


J.A.F.F.Y.

by EvilKitten42



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel
Genre: Acting AU, Actor Bucky Barnes, Australia AU, Descriptions of anxiety and panic attacks, Designer Steve Rogers, I seem to be very bad at knowing when to stop, M/M, Stucky Big Bang 2016, University AU, and also at knowing when to stop name dropping characters, off-screen bigotry, off-screen violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-11 23:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7911508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvilKitten42/pseuds/EvilKitten42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in semi-rural Australia, Bucky Barnes is a first year Acting student trying to navigate his way through university life when he re-meets his childhood best friend and Design student, Steve Rogers. Together they make friends, put on shows, dance around their growing feelings for each other awkwardly, have self-discoveries, and try to make it through the year without going into assignment induced meltdown. Everyone else is just wondering why they decided being friends with actors was a good idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	J.A.F.F.Y.

**Author's Note:**

> Do you ever sit down one day and think "Man, life is pretty stressful, how can I project these thoughts onto fictional characters?" and then two years later you sign up for Stucky Big Bang and decide to actually write it and try to remember all the shit you did in the first year of your acting degree whilst also trying to finish the third year of your acting degree and somehow you end up with 61 pages of fic and a vague sense of accomplishment?  
> Just me?  
> Okay

The thing is, deep down in his gut, Bucky Barnes has no idea what in the hell he’s doing.

He’s managed to coast his way through orientation week so far (“O-Week!” He remembers being told by the overly chipper red-shirted O-Week leaders that had spent the past two days ushering him and all the other first year students around campus like a herd of particularly confused cats. “Best week of the year, so long as you remember it once it’s done!” This had basically set the tone for the whole week) but now that he’s been left alone for longer than 10 minutes he’s starting to feel like he’s made a series of increasingly bad mistakes.

He wanders hopelessly into what he hopes is ‘the TV studio’. He had been reliably informed that, as an actor, most of his classes would be in ‘TV Land’. What he had not been reliably informed of was the real names for any of the buildings. They had numbers on them. He was pretty sure he had the correct one, since it was the most industrial looking of the 5 buildings he’d wandered past, but with nothing to go by and a worrying 15 minutes before anyone else was even meant to turn up, the stress was starting to get to him.

“You can do this.” He mutters to himself as he opens the door to the building and steps in. There’s a short hallway with two rooms on either side, both filled with more tech than Bucky has ever seen before, and that he would definitely break if he tried to touch it. “You can definitely do this.”

He goes into the room at the end of the hallway. It’s large, wide and high with a concrete floor and floor to ceiling black curtains. It’s full of fold out chairs and there’s a very bored looking Lecturer sitting up the front, idly poking at a stack of booklets on the table at the front of the room. He blinks when Bucky walks in.

“Oh hello!” He beams. “I’m Andrew. I work in the AV store.”

“Oh.” Bucky feels awkward standing in the doorway, and he doesn’t actually have any solid idea as to what the AV store is or what it means to work there, so he walks up to Andrew and shakes his hand. “I’m James. I’m an acting student.”

“Here for the elective session?” Andrew asks. He has a very firm handshake and his hands are warm. Bucky is painfully aware of his bad circulation in that moment, and when Andrew lets go Bucky subtly rubs his hands against his jeans to warm them up, just in case he has to touch anyone else in the next half hour. “You’re very early. We like that around here, makes everything easier.”

“Oh good.” Bucky smiles. He may be a tiny bit terrified and a lot awkward, but over the years he’s developed a special secret reserve of charm to draw upon, constantly ready to reassure teachers and convince people that he knows what he’s doing. It’s his greatest asset as a person.  “I’d hate to be the first actor to make things difficult for a techie by being early.”

Andrew laughs at that. Bucky preens internally. He tries very hard not to let other people’s opinions affect him very much, but nothing in the world quite beats being able to make someone laugh.

Other people begin to file in not long after that, including a much younger man named Matt who introduces himself as a Lecturer and mostly looks like he never quite stopped wanting to be a rock star.

Bucky takes a booklet off of Andrew ( _“CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY: A GUIDE”_ it says. Bucky highly doubts that this is accurate) and sits in the second row, close enough to the door that he can make a break for it once everything’s done but not so close that he looks like he’s only gunning to leave. He has avoiding potential after-class awkward discussions down to an art at this point.

(He does not, actually, specifically try to avoid physical interactions. It’s just that he always likes to be on the front foot in every regard, and at this point he’s still feeling like he’s about a step behind where he should be.)

This, of course, means that he gets more than a bit of a shock when a red-haired girl sits down next to him without so much as a word of greeting. He blinks at her. She’s wearing all black despite the fact that it is a Wagga Wagga summer and is, therefore, hotter than any one place has any right to be outside of the tropics. He’s not sure if it’s intimidating or just a painfully bad decision. There is always the possibility that it’s both.

“Natasha.” She says by way of greeting, her voice completely devoid of any kind of inflection. Mentally, Bucky puts a tally mark in the ‘intimidating’ column.

“James.” He replies, not quite as flat but nearly. If there’s one thing he’s learnt, especially through high school, it’s how to match a person blow for blow verbally and still come out on top. “Call me Bucky.”

“Bucky?” She raises a highly shaped eyebrow.

“Yes.” He raises one right back. He had never, and would never, compromise on his name, and he refuses to be one-uped during his first solo human interaction of the week. “Is that a _problem_ , Natasha?”

“Not at all, James.” She smirks, sounding very much like people don’t normally push back when she talks to them. He beams on the inside, proud of his success, even if she called him by his first name. “Course?”

“Stage and Screen.” He says, then tries not to cringe at himself. Everyone in the room was there because they were a part of the Bachelor for Stage and Screen. “Acting.”

“Well wouldn’t you know it.” She crosses her arms, making the leather of her jacket squeak. Bucky feels like he’s getting heatstroke just from looking at her. He wonders if perhaps she’s from Queensland and is therefore immune to all kinds of heat and rational thought. “I’m an Actor too. Are you from Wagga originally?”

“Born and bred.” He smiles, as if being from _Wagga_ was something of any particular acclaim. “Where are you from?”

“Far away.” She smirks, obviously being cryptic on purpose. He puts a mental tally in the newly formed ‘pretentious’ column in his head. He’s about to open his mouth and ask her what kind of response that was when he’s interrupted by someone in the doorway gasping dramatically and dropping their bag to the floor.

Everyone in the room whips around to stare at the new person, Bucky included, and he’s greeted by the sight of a tall blond guy, messenger bag in a pile at his feet and a look on his face as if he’s just seen a ghost. He’s staring hard at Bucky and there’s something so familiar in his gaze that Bucky feels suddenly overwhelmed by an almost crushing feeling of nostalgia.

“Yes?” Natasha snaps when the guy’s silence has stretched on for so long that other people in the room have started wondering whether it’s worth it to keep paying attention to him. He hasn’t stopped staring at Bucky.

“Bucky?” The guys says, something close to wonder in his deep voice, and the sound of it knocks something loose in Bucky’s brain.

“Steve?” Bucky says before he’s even finished thinking it, a smile spreading across his face uncontrollably. He jumps up and clambers around Natasha and over to where Steve (his Steve, his best friend, his missing limb for the past _six years_ -) is standing. A chair definitely falls over in his wake. He does not care.

“Bucky!” Steve beams, pure and exploding with excitement, just like Bucky remembers from when they were kids. Steve grabs him in the sort of hug that would probably have crushed anyone smaller than Bucky, but as it is he squeezes back just as hard and almost manages to lift Steve off the ground in the process. He’s so happy that he can’t help but laugh.

“You got big!” He holds Steve at arms-length so he can look him up and down. He’s grown a lot since Bucky last saw him, as well as managed to develop some muscle tone. He’s not a mountain of a man by any stretch, but compared to a faded memories Bucky’s been running over for years he looks like a goliath, even whilst wearing a stupid shirt with a pun on the front. Steve laughs with him.

“You got scruffy.” He shoots back, tugging at a stray lock of hair that’s fallen out of Bucky’s ponytail and into his face. Bucky’s chest feels like it’s going to burst.

“At least your dress sense hasn’t changed.” Bucky laughs as he pulls Steve into another hug. “I missed you, you absolute punk.”

“You too, jerk.” Steve sounds so elated that Bucky’s chest aches. He’d forgotten how much positive energy Steve could radiate.

“Um.” Says Matt the Lecturer. Bucky and Steve pull back and are greeted to the sight of every single pair of eyes in the room being trained on them. Natasha is actually smiling, which is probably concerning. One guy in the corner is gleefully texting without taking his eyes off of them. Andrew looks, mostly, confused. Matt has a booklet hanging limply from one hand, as if he’d forgotten about it. “We need to finish handing out the elective booklets.” He finishes lamely.

“Oh.” Steve rushes to pick up his bag, ducking his head slightly. “Sorry, sir.”

“We haven’t seen each other since we were thirteen.” Bucky explains, mustering up enough charm for the two of them. At the back of the room, one girl turns to her friend and says “aww” audibly. Someone else makes a gagging noise.

 _‘_ _Well,’_ Bucky thinks, dragging Steve over to the seats so they can sit together. _‘You can’t win ‘em all.’_

+++

“So how’s Becca?” Steve asks as they walk into a building that he is reliably informed is called ‘Eat @ 20’, but that he can’t stop thinking of as the canteen. “God, how old would she be now?”

“Sixteen.” Bucky smiles. He hasn’t really stopped smiling since he realised who Steve was, but by the same token, neither has Steve.

“Fuck off.” Steve jabs Bucky in the shoulder.

“ _Language._ ” Bucky replies, in a perfect imitation of his own mother. Steve is floored for a moment, the memory of them perfecting the exact tone of her voice hitting him full force.

“I forgot you did that.”

“I still manage to contain multitudes.” Bucky beams before dumping his bag on a table and falling into a seat. “Becks is actually at dance school now. In Wodonga.”

“Really?” Steve sits as well, tucking his bag under his chair. “Shit, that’s far. Is she boarding?”

“Mum and dad moved with her.” Bucky shrugs. “I stayed for the beautiful scenery and thriving culture.”

“Did not.” Steve accuses, kicking him under the table. “Where do you live now?”

“ _Ow_.” Bucky says pointedly. “Dial back the power kick, superboy, my bones aren’t equipped for it.” He narrows his eyes suddenly. “How’d you get your power up anyway?”

“Didn’t answer my question.” Steve hedges.

“Share house.” Bucky rolls his eyes. It’s more endearing than it was when they were kids. Steve wonders how long the novelty of Bucky’s old habits is going to last. “I’m on the corner of Crampton Street. We call ourselves the ‘Howling Commandos’ and one of the guys unironically wears a bowler hat. Now.” Bucky leans forward. “Where’d you get the level up?”

“Uh.” Steve awkwardly rubs the back of his neck. “This isn’t, I mean, I don’t really like, you know, talking about it in public-”

“Woah, yeah, shit.” Bucky holds up his hands. “Sorry, mate, sorry. Forgot for a second we were in the real world.” He blinks at Steve for a second, something like awe in his expression. “This is really fucking weird, isn’t it?”

“It really is.” Steve laughs. “It’s like one of those dumb shows you used to make me watch until my eyes bled.”

“Those were art and you will shut your damn mouth.” Bucky beams, all bright and charming, and Steve can’t believe how lucky he is, even as Bucky starts to hum some random TV theme song that no one would have heard of since 1998.

+++

The next week is their first proper day of class, which Bucky finds terrifying in the abstract sort of way most things about higher education are terrifying.

“I don’t know anyone.” He had said to Morita, one of his many house mates and the only other first year, the night before. Morita, who was busy colour co-ordinating his meal times or whatever it is medicine students did, barely gave Bucky an eyeroll.

“You know that Shaun guy.”

“Steve.” Bucky had corrected, firmer than he intended to. “And he’s doing the Design speciality. He just takes an acting elective. For the class on _Wednesday_.”

“Wow, your life sure is the worst.” Morita had deadpanned. They may have only been living in the same space for about two months, but Bucky was already more used to Morita’s tone than he should have been. “Make new friends. You’ve done it before.”

“Not on this kind of scale.” Bucky had grumped. Morita, obviously wanting the conversation to end, had thrown a pencil at him. Bucky had taken that as his cue to leave and went to complain to Gabe instead.

(“Ah, the days of being a J.A.F.F.Y.” Gabe’d said fondly while Dernier nodded in the background. “Remember when not knowing people was our biggest problem?”

“Calm down, you’re only in second year.” Bucky’d grumbled. “What’s a J.A.F.F.Y.?” Gabe had looked at him in confusion.

“Just Another Fucking First Year.” He looked to Dernier. “Honestly, it’s like they don’t teach them anything anymore.”)

And now here he is at his first day of class and he knows, at most, the weird Natasha girl who had continued to wear leather even though it had continued to be hotter than it had any right to be for the first week of March. Wonderful. Astounding. Bucky kind of wanted to die.

“Well hello James.” Natasha, speak of the devil, appeared as if from nowhere at Bucky’s shoulder while he stood in the car park at 8:55am on a Tuesday morning, hating everything. He managed through sheer force of will not to jump. “Ready for class?”

“Always am, darlin’.” Bucky beamed, and got the satisfaction of seeing Natasha’s smugly arched brow drop down a millimetre.

“Don’t call be darling.” She replied. On the surface it sounded calm, but Bucky was good enough at subtext to realise that she had basically just threatened to murder him.

“Sure thing,” He nodded. Murderous intent aside, he’d never been dumb enough to keep pushing a joke after someone told him to stop. “...Pumpkin.”

She huffed something that might have been a laugh, and Bucky figured that meant he was in the clear.

“Calling a ginger ‘pumpkin’.” She smirked and started walking towards the Movement studio. “How very original.”

“I try.” Bucky smiled back as he walked with her. If his only ally here was going to be Natasha then he was going to make sure she was firmly on his side.

The Movement studio was the main Acting building and where, as the O Week leaders had cheerfully told him, he was going to spend most of his waking hours over the next three years. There was a long wooden ramp up to the building, with a tiny set of amphitheatre seats directly in front of the glass front of the building. There was a sad looking barbecue shoved in next to the surrounding shrubbery. They pushed through one of the doors and into the foyer, where a few people had already set up camp on the island/serving bar that dominated the middle of the room, with double doors on either side leading to both sets of studios.

“Hello Tony.” Natasha gestures vaguely at the boy who is, apparently, Tony. Bucky had seen him occasionally through-out the past week and had learned very little about him beyond the fact that he wore sunglasses inside.

“Romanoff, always a pleasure.” Tony beamed, and Bucky wasn’t sure which surprised him more: the fact Tony had a painfully American accent or the fact he knew Natasha’s last name. He looked about 17, with the sort of facial hair that he’d look back on in five years and regret deeply. “And you are?”

“Bucky Barnes.” Bucky didn’t bother with a first name. He knew better than to tempt fate a second time.

“Honestly?” Tony asked, something like glee in his voice. Bucky wasn’t sure. Compared to the drawl he was used to, Tony’s voice was jaw clenchingly sharp to his ears. “Or is this one of those things where you try to convince me it’s real because I’m a dumb American?”

“It’s a nickname, but it’s my name.” Bucky said, slower than before.

“Because I’m not a dumb American, you know.” Tony continued as if he hadn’t actually heard Bucky, which was probably very likely, then grabbed his hand to shake it firmly. “I’m a Stark. I’m the heir to the entirety of Stark Industries. And I’m an engineer. A good one. I graduated _summa cum laude_ from MIT last June.”

“Ha, _‘cum’_.” Another student laughs, and then proceeds to hide behind his sunglasses when Tony turns to him.

“That’s a good one.” Tony said in the sort of declarative way you’d expect someone to speak at a press conference, not in a Uni room foyer about a lacklustre cum joke. “What’s your name? We can exchange word play.”

“Scott Summers.” The kid said, a single eyebrow raised in Tony’s direction.

Bucky had a moment where he realised that, as of today, he’d be dealing with Tony for multiple hours a day, several days a week, for the next three years.

He takes a moment to breathe through that realisation, something close to a headache forming behind his eyes at the very thought, and is then saved from any further conversation by their Lecturer turning up, the rest of the class hot on his heels.

+++

“This kid is out of this world.” Bucky says, for maybe the fourth time since Steve invited him over for dinner, and shoves another forkful of pasta into his mouth.

“Sounds it.” Steve nods, pouring himself another giant glass of orange juice. He checks, quickly, to see if his mum is still loading the dishwasher or if she was doing that mum thing where she drank coffee in the doorway and pretended not to listen. “How old did he say he was?”

“Turns 18 in May.” Bucky takes a second to swallow his food before affecting a posture that Steve can only assume is reminiscent of how Tony carries himself. “But, you know, that means he’s the youngest person in the degree. He did an engineering degree at _MIT_ and now he is gracing us with his _presence_ in our _dinky little degree_ , and doesn’t that just make him _so cool_ , Steven? Doesn’t it bloody just.”

“Cut him some slack, it’s your first day.” Steve laughed. Bucky had a few impressions down pat, but his current one was far more reminiscent of an American talk show host than any real human person. “He probably has his reasons for coming here.”

“So damn diplomatic.” Bucky scoffed. “You watch, you’ve got class with him tomorrow, you’ll be just as sick of him.”

“I doubt that.” Steve sing-songed. Bucky pretended to stab him with a fork instead of arguing more, which was actually pretty par for the course with Bucky.

+++

Wednesday came.

Steve was 100% already sick of Tony.

Bucky was never allowed to know this.

The main problem Steve had was actually also one of the really fascinating things about Tony (who, Steve is pretty sure, was the guy texting about him and Bucky during their fateful O-Week elective session). This is the fact that he never seems to actually listen to himself when he talks, which is especially fascinating as he seems to do nothing _but_ talk.

“What I’m really trying to say,” Tony says, half way through minute 3 of his latest impromptu monologue. Steve is trying very hard to focus on the wedges he got for lunch. “Is that our Lecturer, Thomas, right? His name’s Thomas? He needs to chill the hell out with the cardio. Not all of us were born with an Olympic gold medal in walking 8 different ways at once whilst doing tongue twisters.”

“That’s not cardio.” Steve sighs. “And the work outs aren’t that bad. Or do rich people in America have people to work out for them?”

“Hardy-har.” Tony deadpans, although there’s something in his face that rubs Steve the wrong way and makes him feel like he’s said the wrong thing. “Don’t be ridiculous. I build _robots_ to do everything for me, like a _real_ rich person.”

“Of course.” Bucky buts in, dumping his bag on a chair and flopping down next to Steve. “How very remiss of you, Steve. Don’t make assumptions about the rich kid.”

Tony’s eyes narrow.

“I know you’re being sarcastic, but your point stands, and I’ll therefore take it as read that you’re on my side.”

“Do you ever listen to yourself when you talk?” Natasha asks, which is the first thing she’s said since she sat down at their table and began eating her wrap in what Steve can only describe as an intimidating manner.

“It’s a mix bag.” Tony blinks at her, all fake innocence. “I like to keep myself on my toes.”

 _‘Well_ ,’ Steve thinks, resigned to his lunch hour becoming The Tony Show, ‘ _that explains a lot.’_

+++

By Saturday Bucky has received an astonishing 23 friend requests on Facebook, and he spends a stupidly long time staring at his phone, refusing to click on the notification so he can bask in the glow of so many people wanting to add him.

“Stop being smug.” Dum Dum grumbles at dinner, which Bucky assumes is the only time of day he’s allowed to take his bowler hat off, as it’s the only time of day he can be found without it. “It doesn’t count if it’s out of obligation.”

“It totally does.” Bucky sticks his tongue out and sits there clicking accept on all the names in the list with all the grandeur of someone approving a VIP list for the Queen. “Just ask _‘Sam Wilson, Canberra, 17 mutual friends’._ ”

“I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for him.” Dum Dum says dryly. He was three years deep into a Business degree of some description, which Bucky found more hilarious the longer he knew him.

“Stop antagonising each other and eat your schniddy.” Gabe chastised as he shoved chicken schnitzel onto their plates, and they all took a moment to laugh at Falsworth’s look of utter disgust.

+++

“No, you don’t get it.” Bucky pressed, far too earnestly, as he shuffled along with Steve, the both of them stuck in the middle of the gaggle of Actors swarming to the car park. “It’s all about staying on your toes.”

“We just played Space Jump for an hour and a half.” Steve shook his head. He said he’d taken the Acting elective so he could try and understand how actor’s worked, but all he really seemed to be finding out was that they got more confusing the more you tried to make sense of them. “I don’t see how that helps.”

“It develops your improv skills.” Bucky continued. He was far more concerned about this subject than Steve thought he had a right to be. “Helps you handle if there’s a fuck up on stage, or if you get into experimental theatre. You need these skills! You never know when you might get thrown a curve ball. Sam, back me up here.”

“I am taking no part in this.” Sam smiles, since he is the only Psychology student in the world who decided an Acting elective was a good idea and that meant he could spend all his spare time finding them amusing.

(“Actors are pretty screwed up people.” Sam’d said when Thomas the Lecturer had asked them to introduce themselves. “I’m trying to get some insight into my future clientele.” He said it as a joke. Bucky had the distinct feeling he wasn’t joking.)

“Traitor.” Bucky accuses.

“Loki!” A great voice booms from across the parking lot, causing the whole gaggle of actors to stop and search for the source.

The source happened to be a giant slab of beefcake standing next to a cherry red Maserati (“Oh, my god” Bucky, who had been a renowned Car Nut for the entirety of their childhoods, had breathed into his hands) and is therefore not actually that hard to spot.

“Hello, Thor.” Loki sighs, breaking away from the group to walk towards Thor, who has his long blond hair pulled into a ponytail paired with a ‘Suns Out Guns Out’ shirt. _‘Some curve ball’_ Steve thinks, as Loki ambles in the most reluctant way possible towards a man that can only be described as a golden god.

Bucky has, apparently, lost all ability to support his own body weight.

“Oh, my _god_.” Bucky repeats, clinging to Steve’s arm. “Steve. Steve am I dreaming this man or can you see him too?”

“I see him.” Steve pats Bucky’s hand in a way he hopes is comforting. Thor is, objectively, a very attractive man, (a very, very attractive man, if Steve is being 100% honest) but he still thinks Bucky’s over-reacting.

(He files away the fact he feels a tiny, jealous pang in his chest away for later. He’d had moments like that when they were newly teenagers and he had hoped it had vanished forever. He hopes, distantly, that repression is the best medicine in this particular incidence.)

“Damn.” Sam adds, which does not help Steve out at all.

“That’s Loki’s brother.” Natasha supplies from right next to them, even though they hadn’t heard her approach. Steve takes several moments to marvel at the fact that Loki, who was the classes resident Wanker Actor (TM) and spent most of his time wearing band shirts and impractical jewellery and trying too hard to smile when other people engaged him in conversation, was in any way related to someone who literally looked like the sun took orders from him. “They’re heirs to the Odinson energy company. Thor plays _rugby_.”

Across the lot, Thor lets out a laugh at something Loki said, throwing his head back as he climbs back into the car with Loki in the passenger seat, and several members of the acting class let out audible squeaks.

Bucky is one of them.

“Pull yourself together, James.” Natasha smirks, but her eyes are wide too, so Steve just stands alone in his tiny pit of despair. “Don’t let them know you’re a sucker for Norse names.”

“What religion are Norse people?” Bucky asks. “Because I’m converting.”

+++

“You’re Bucky, right?” Asks a very friendly looking blond boy, who Bucky is pretty sure is named Frank and takes the Wednesday Acting class.

“Sure am.” Bucky smiles in a way that he knows is charming.

“I’m Foggy.” The guy smiles.

“Foggy?” Bucky asks, and feels kind of bad for sounding incredulous when his own nickname wasn’t much better. “You take the Wednesday class, right?”

“Yeah, I’m a law student the rest of the time.” Foggy smiles, warm, and Bucky boggles at the fact a _lawyer_ was doing an _acting elective_. “Just wanted to introduce myself properly. It’s hard to actually remember people’s names when the only thing we’ve been using them is for games.”

Bucky’s inclined to agree, even if their Lecturer had been very earnest about the fact that name learning games were important, especially the one where you had to call someone’s name and then throw a ball to them. Mostly, Bucky had committed three names to memory and rotated them for two hours.

“Well, It’s nice to meet you Foggy.” Bucky shakes his hand. He has a good firm handshake, for all that Foggy was a half a head shorter than him and had the look of someone who would always be willing to hug you. Maybe that was a class lawyers had to take. _Good Handshakes 101_. “Can’t wait to see more of your work.”

“Fog!” A guy with a mobility cane in one hand and three containers of chips in the other yelled from the entrance to the Eat @ 20 seating area. “Where are we sitting?”

“Gotta scurry.” Foggy smiled again and ran to his friend. Bucky waved vaguely after him as he ran up to his friend and looped their arms to start walking towards one of the booths that sat off to the side of the seating area.

“Hey!” Steve jogged up to Bucky, Natasha following at an unassuming yet still noticeable distance. Bucky was still unsure how much of what she did was real and how much was just to make other people nervous. He wondered if that was par for the course with Queenslanders. “Making friends?”

“Aren’t I always?” Bucky smiled. Steve looked far too proud of him considering the fact that Steve knew exactly nothing of Bucky’s last six years of friendship experience. “C’mon, or they’ll run out of wing dings before you can get your mitts on them.”

+++

“Excuse me?”

Tony glances up from his laptop and looks at the source of the timid voice. It ends up being a very nice looking man, with curly hair and tan skin and a whole lot of plaid.

“Yes?”

“My name’s Bruce. I need to use the charger port.” The man, Bruce, holds up his laptop. “This is the only library booth with a free seat. Can I use it?”

“Now what kind of person would I be if I said no?” Tony smiles and gestures to the seat. (The answer to his rhetorical question is: probably the same sort of person who applied to an acting degree in semi-rural Australia purely to spite their father. However, assuming Tony Stark’s behaviour towards his father carried over to any other person in the world was a very silly assumption to make.)

Bruce smiles gratefully.

“So,” Tony leans forward once Bruce is settled. Bruce looks very nice, and also as if he actually knows advanced mathematics, which is more than can be said for anyone in the acting degree, and Tony wants to be his friend. Bruce looks up at him. “I’m Tony. Tell me about yourself.”

+++

“Hey.” Bucky pulled Steve aside at the end of Design class. “What character did you get for The Hunger Games thing? I got Fox Face.”

“Glimmer.” Steve held up his little slip of paper as proof. “I know it’s not very design-y, but I think I might just throw glitter at a model and call it a day.”

The assignment was: each student had been given a character from the first Hunger Games novel and they had to design a haute couture costume based off their character, organise a model, and also keep a folio of all their ideas, tests, and resources.

It was, in Bucky’s opinion, a bit of a large ask for first session Design students.

“No.” Steve shoves his arm playfully when he expresses this opinion. “You think it’s a large ask because you’re taking it as an elective and you just want to focus on that monologue thing.”

“And the movement assessment!” Bucky defended. “I have a lot on my plate, Steve.”

“Your life is so hard.” Steve deadpanned. A lot of people had been saying that to Bucky lately. He was beginning to feel like maybe he was being a bit too insufferable a bit too early in the term. “I’m doing that monologue assessment too. At least you know how to… Do the acting thing.”

“ _Do the acting thing_?” Bucky raised an eyebrow at Steve, who’s ears had turned ever so slightly pink. “Oh Steve, you sweet, simple galah.”

This comment only caused Steve’s ears to go pinker, which really only made the comparison more appropriate.

“Shut your gob.” Steve shoved Bucky’s shoulder again. “You know what I mean.”

“Hey, c’mon, I’m kidding.” Bucky shoved Steve’s shoulder right back, pushing him in the direction of Bucky’s car. “At least you can design haute couture. I just know how to wear it.”

“Get off it.”

“These tank tops cost more than you’d expect.” Bucky sniffed haughtily. This was not, in essence, a lie. Yes, the gear he wore to classes were generally pretty cheap, and he mostly bought that kind of stuff from op shops. However, if Steve were to look at Bucky’s wardrobe for any length of time he would definitely see jackets that cost more than Bucky was really proud of. “Anyway, smarty pants, I’m buggered for ideas for this design thing. Wanna get lunch and stab me with a pencil until I have something to show the Lecturer next week?”

“Well,” Steve sighed as if it were a great trial. “I _guess_ , if stabbing’s involved.”

“So kind.” Bucky rolled his eyes and unlocked his car so he could climb into the driver’s seat.

“Hey, you brought it up.”

+++

“Bucky sure is spending a lot of time with that Steve guy.” Gabe said that night at dinner, since Bucky was spending yet another night eating at Steve’s. Morita raised an eyebrow at him.

“It’s been two weeks.” He shrugs. “They haven’t seen each other in six years.”

“The fact we know these exact details probably proves Gabe’s point.” Falsworth says diplomatically.

“I’m not saying it’s bad.” Gabe explains. “I’m just saying it’s happening.”

“Your face is happening.” Dum Dum shot back, hunched over his food and with a hand on his temple, as often happened when he’d had a statistics class during the day. Gabe laughed.

“Not your best comeback.” Gabe pointed at Dum Dum with his fork.

Across the table, Dernier said “You’re _face_ isn’t the best comeback” in French and Gabe flipped him off, which meant it was a pretty normal Thursday for them.

+++

“So!” Tony calls out. Tony has volume control, Steve’s even seen him use it, but apparently he’s in a _mood_ and feels like having all eyes in Eat @ 20 on him. “It’s been three weeks. I’m bored. What is there to do in the grand ol’ town of _Wagga_?”

“Eat chips and commit crime.” Steve responds. Tony blinks at him behind his ridiculous sunglasses. “And half the time there’s no crime.”

It's Steve’s default answer to new people since it is, for the most part, true. They have a minimum of six fish n’ chip shops, but only one cinema, a handful of sports grounds, laser tag, and a pool. They didn’t even replace the old bowling alley until late 2012 (after the other had closed when Steve was _nine_ ) and the gymnastics place had stopped being cool after a kid (Bucky’s sister) had gotten their foot all cut-up in the foam pit. There were five dance schools, but only two of them were good and only one of those was _fun_.

“You’re kidding.” Tony says flatly. He looks over at Bucky, who was hiding his smile by not looking up from his burrito. “Space Jump, tell me he’s kidding.”

“Well.” Bucky says, face suddenly completely blank. “There’s always the croquet club.”

Tony makes a noise like an indignant bird while Steve laughs into his milkshake.

+++

One Monday, after the compulsory cross-degree writing class, Sam Wilson sits down next to Bucky and Steve and, with all the enthusiasm of someone who doesn’t really want to be doing what they’re doing, tells them all that he’s made some new friends.

“Who are they?” Steve asked, curious to a fault. He and Sam got along like a house on fire, which Bucky was very proud of.

(He was also, just maybe, a tiny bit jealous. He was trying to ignore that bit for the sake of not being an asshole.)

“Us!” Says a very bubbly ginger girl, who is dragging a confused looking Peter Quill behind her like a lost puppy. “I’m Doreen!”

“Hey, guys.” Peter says and drops into a seat. Peter was another acting student and he, much like everyone else in the degree, had yet to really work out who liked him out of politeness and who actually liked him. Normally you could find him talking to the TV production students or in the Uni gym, headphones in and going so hard it looked concerning.

“Are you all actors too?” Doreen asked, taking a seat. She had the sort of voice that carried no matter what else seemed to be going on.

“Mostly.” Bucky smiles. He’d grown up with a younger sister. Doreen’s enthusiasm was nothing new.

“Yo.” Says Tony, who’s silence would have been uncharacteristic if he hadn’t been spending the last 5 minutes trying to drink an entire large coffee as fast as humanly possible. From what Bucky could tell, it hadn’t been for any particular reason. That was just how Tony drank coffee. “Degree?”

“Computer Science.” Doreen beams. Tony’s eyes go very wide. “I take a psychology elective, that’s how I met Sam!”

“That’s-” Steve starts, only for Tony to physically cut him off with a flap of his hand.

“Computer Science?” Tony asks. When Doreen nods Tony’s smile is so large it looks like he’s going to break his own face in half. “Oh, Miss Doreen, you and I have _so much_ to discuss.”

“Oh no.” Peter mumbles, which very accurately captures the current mood of the whole table.

+++

“I think,” Doreen says forty-five minutes later, when she and Tony have moved on from computer mumbo jumbo and have instead started a topic everyone else at the table could become invested in. “That we all know, deep in our hearts, that the best Batman portrayal ever was Adam West in the 1966 TV show.”

The entire table goes dead quiet for a solid 15 seconds. It is, frankly, a miracle. Bucky would find it admirable if he didn’t also find it _deeply offensive_.

“Oh, I _like_ you.” Natasha smiles, and then it is _on_.

+++

Pepper Potts is a saint amongst humanity.

Tony is considering getting this on a T-shirt for her, maybe a whole range with different designs and graphics, but that would probably classify as overkill and Tony’s trying to be at least half as cool around Pepper as he pretends he is.

(The key word being: _trying_ )

Okay, really, the thing is: Pepper is amazing. Tony wants, very much, for her to think (know) how awesome he also is so he can bump is Best Australia Friends count up from one (Bruce). And he also really, really needs her to stop looking at him like he’s just asked her to help him hide a body.

“You want me,” She says, slowly, chicken aioli wrap still halfway to her mouth. There’s a piece of lettuce dangling precariously close to her white blouse. “Me, a very normal social science student, whom you met two weeks ago, to go back to your house and look at your _robot_?”

“Yes.” Tony says. He was pretty sure he hadn’t misspoken the first time. Had he been clear? Should he point out the lettuce while they were pointing obvious things out, or would that just come across as sarcastic?

“That.” Pepper takes a moment to close her eyes and breathe heavily through her nose. She sets her wrap down and steeples her fingers. Tony is mostly glad that the lettuce is no longer threatening the integrity of her outfit. He’d hate for her to have to go back to class with a greenery covered blouse. Unless that was a Thing in Australia. He was still unsure as to what constituted a Thing in Australia. “That is the worst pick-up line I have ever heard in my life.”

What?

“What?” Tony shakes his head and leans forward. “I’m sorry, we’re-”

“I mean I guess you get points for the engineering facts before hand.” Pepper continues, oblivious to the fact that Tony had resumed talking. This is not a common occurrence in Tony’s life. “But it wasn’t even _funny_ , or _clever_! I heard the same line during my year 10 metal work class, so-”

“Woah, Pepper!” Tony holds his hands up in the vague hope that a physical gesture would alert her to the fact that she was monologuing. She stops and stares at him, her mouth a thin line. “I’m beginning to think you and I are on very different wavelengths.”

“That is-”

“Not a joke.” He grins and reaches into his pocket for his phone. “But I appreciate the inference that everything I say is hilarious.”

“That isn’t what I meant.” She huffs, eyes narrowed as Tony scrolls through his photos.

“Sure it wasn’t.” He finds the photo he wants and slides it across the table to her. “And this is what _I_ meant.”

She looks down at the photo of the box of wires on wheels he has taken to calling ‘U’. Her eyebrows move through many and various emotions, and seem to finally settle of befuddled furrowing.

“You… Actually have a robot.” She can’t seem to take her eyes off the picture.

“Yes.” He tries very hard not to sound exasperated. Pepper has been his main choice for New Best Australia Friend for the past two weeks and he very much does not want her to begin to regret this decision.

(Tony does not know, and will probably continue to not know for many years, that Pepper had regretted their friendship ever since about ten minutes into it. Tony had paid for her lunch when she was short of money one day, and as part of his apparent charitable event of the month he had decide that buying her food meant she had to talk to him, always, for the rest of their lives. Most days she was sort of fine with that.)

“In your house. A robot in your house.”

“I said that, yes.” He pushes his glasses back up his nose. “I’m trying to make it respond to different voices, not just my own, and higher registers are always tricky to allow for. I figured you’d be interested enough in the whole thing that I could kill two birds with one stone.”

He does not mention that part of why he’s asking her is because Doreen had a class all afternoon and Tony was still mad about her Opinions with regard to Batman related media. He was 98% sure that telling one of your new friends that they were your second choice out of pure pettiness and scheduling was not a good thing to do.

“You’ve built a robot that can respond to _different voices_.” She looked up at him again. “What did you say you built it out of?”

“Stuff, mostly.” Tony shrugged. He wasn’t ashamed of it, but he figured Pepper would not approve of the butchering of one of the Uni’s pre-supplied microwave and kettle sets, even if he had replaced them before anyone in the Hamptons buildings had noticed. “Old computer parts I had lying around, bits and bobs, normal robot building stuff.”

“ _Normal robot building stuff._ ” Pepper whispered, as if she could not believe her ears. She took another deep breath through her nose. “I’m sorry for thinking you were hitting on me, Tony. I would love to meet your tiny robot after class.”

“Pepper Potts.” Tony smiled, taking his phone back triumphantly. “You are truly a saint amongst humanity.”

+++

Sometimes Steve really missed Sydney.

Well, actually, that’s not the truth. Sydney was big and crowded and full of birds that never shut up, and even though trains almost outnumbered people he could probably count on one hand the amount of times one had run on time. Sydney was where he’d been forced to travel for medical treatment and where he’d _had_ to live for six years. Occasionally he missed the buildings, the sheer sense of _scale_ Sydney had compared to places like Wagga, the art instillations and the sky scrapers and the stores so arty they covered themselves in vines to appeal to the hipster market, but as a whole he didn’t really miss Sydney as a city.

In truth, he misses the memories he made there. Very specifically, the one’s he’d made with Peggy Carter.

Peggy Carter had been two years above him at high school and was the only person in the whole place who’d befriended him. She was from England and was headstrong and refused to compromise on what she believed in. She always said she knew what it was like to be the weird kid people avoided. Steve’d had a crush on her for two years and a deep running admiration for what she represented as a human that would probably last until the day he died.

 _“I miss Sydney”_ He texts her while he sits in front of his house waiting for Bucky to pick him up for Uni.

(He has his green P plates, it’s just that he and his mum only have one car and nine times out of ten she left for work before he left for Uni. Bucky being willing to taxi him around anyway was, frankly, a blessing.)

 _“You do bloody not”_ Peggy replies. “ _Or have all those text essays about why trains are terrible been an elaborate joke?”_

 _“well I miss /you/, in any case”_ He replies. Bucky pulls into his driveway right as it sends.

“Morning.” Bucky yawns when Steve opens the door.

“Mornin’.” Steve grins back. His phone buzzes.

_“Of course you do. I’m a delight”_

“Anyone I know?” Bucky asks, an eyebrow raised.

“Sydney friend.” Steve explains and sends “ _delightfully terrifying might be more accurate”_ to Peggy.

+++

“What did you say your name was, again?” Steve asks out of the blue one Wednesday, when everyone’s putting their shoes back on and trying to organise lifts down to Eat @ 20 for lunch (“I heard it was called The Nosh.” Peter Quill says, with far too much genuine despair). Tony, who had been having a grand old time monologuing to Wanda Maximoff, the quietest acting student in all known history, looks up at Steve in askance.

“Tony.” Tony says. Even with his sunglasses on Bucky can tell his eyes are narrowed suspiciously.

“No.” Steve does one of those weird facial expressions where it looks like he wishes he could sigh but he’s too polite to actually do so. “Your last name?”

“Stark.” Tony still looks suspicious, but there’s a set to his shoulders that he always adopts whenever he gets to bring up the fact he’s richer than all of them combined (which, to be entirely fair to them, was not actually that hard). “And before you ask another vague and concerning question: Yes, as in Stark Industries.”

Steve’s whole face changes, lighting up with something Bucky would hasten to call respect.

“Oh, my god.” Steve extends a hand to Tony, back straight. Tony looks between Steve’s face and his hand a few times before actually shaking it. Behind them, Wanda has hoisted herself up onto the island bench and is watching silently. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“At the risk of ruining your mood...” Tony takes his hand back and shoves both of them as far into his pants pockets as they can go. “Why am I being thanked?”

“Your company- Well, I guess, your parents company, they funded my medical treatment.” Steve says, each word given the sort of weight that makes Bucky feel heavy even though he’s not on the receiving end.

He and Steve had discussed his medical stuff in private back in the first week of term. It was the whole reason he’d gone to Sydney as a kid. His doctor had recommended him for an experimental medical treatment that might repair the damage in his lungs. He’d gone to endless meetings and sat through endless interviews and he and his mum had been endlessly worried, and then his doctor had gotten the funding and Steve had been in the all clear to get weird medical lasers shot at him for the next two years.

It had not been the lightest conversation of their friendship.

“Their company?” Tony asked, but his tone had changed. Distant was the only word Bucky could think of for it. Some part of Tony was very far away.

“Yes.” Steve nods, oblivious to whatever change had happened in Tony. “My doctor, Erskine, he put me forward for some grant your father was offering, to help experimental-”

“ _Medical treatments for disadvantaged kids around the globe_. Yes, I know.” Tony waved his hand slightly. “I remember when it was all happening. Dad spent a lot of time talking about that particular plan.” He looks at Steve from behind his glasses for a beat. “You got one of the grants?”

“Yes.” Steve’s enthusiasm has dulled slightly in the face of Tony’s tone, but he was still pressing forward with the conversation. “I just wanted to thank you, you know? You dad doing that saved us a whole lot of stress. It meant I could get healthy, my mum could afford a car that worked, and-”

“Save the speech for when you meet my dad.” Tony smiles and pats Steve on the shoulder as he says it, but Bucky can’t shake the feeling that Tony’s feelings weren’t particularly warm in that moment.

“I highly doubt I ever will.” Steve seems to have finally cottoned on to the fact that Tony wasn’t 100% there, and it makes his eyebrows furrow. Bucky locks eyes with Wanda over their heads. She looks just as concerned as Bucky feels.

“I’m glad you got it, Steve.” Tony says with more feeling this time. “I’d hate to think of what Buckster here would do without you to keep him in line.” And with that Tony grabs his bag and walks out of the room. Steve stares after him for a moment. Bucky can’t even feel offended over the nickname.

“What crawled up his ass?” Steve asks, in the concerned way that only Steve can ask questions like that.

“Dunno, Stevie.” Bucky sighs. Wanda has switched her attention to Scott Summers and Peter Quill, who are having an extended argument over whether it was called Eat @ 20 or The Nosh. “Let’s just get some food before our stomachs implode.”

+++

“So!” Hannah the compulsory writing Lecturer says, blonde curls bouncing. She’s not much older than most of them, actually, but she’s the sort of teacher who brings enthusiasm to the table and lets them all take a coffee break halfway through her 8am lectures, which makes her a Cool Lecturer instead of a High And Mighty Toddler. “Right now we’re going to go around the room and I just want to hear your general idea for what your final essay assessment subject will be. Remember, there’s no such thing as a stupid idea, and if anyone laughs at yours then it’s because theirs is shit and they need to feel superior.”

 _‘_ _Well,’_ Steve supposes, ‘ _that’s one way of putting it.’_

The premise of the essay was, basically, that it was a literary free-for-all. You could write an essay, or a journal entry, or an editorial, or whatever you wanted about any kind of subject you could think of so long as you were interested and it involved some sort of critical thinking. Compared to the previous assessments it was sort of like Hannah had dropped them all in a field and told them to find a blade of grass they found fascinating.

“Okay, so, let’s start at this end of the room,” She points to her left, at Tony, who’s reclining in his chair in the carefully disaffected manner he seems to have perfected over the course of his life time. “And then work our way around. So, Tony, would you like to start us off?”

“Sure thing.” Tony grins, his voice a purposely lazy drawl, and for a moment Steve has to remind himself that Tony is _17_ and even though he _should_ know better, he _doesn’t_ , and you have to be patient with young people like that.

(Steve pointedly does not think about the fact that he’s only a year older than Tony and, therefore, has no room to talk. He also does not think of the fact that he’s probably just projecting his pre-existing feelings towards Tony back onto him after the abrupt ending to the conversation a few days before. He is definitely not thinking of any of this.)

“How science fiction in media has become the foundation for science fact.” Tony says.

“The social impact of modern celebrity culture.” Darcy jumps in. She’s a Social Science student who, Steve’s pretty sure, is the only person in the year who had decided to take the Tuesday acting elective instead of the Wednesday one.

“How soundtracks play an important role in movies.” Says Thor, who looks less sure of his idea, which is endearingly annoying only because his idea is actually pretty decent. “You know, how it makes the whole mood feel.”

“Hm.” Natasha clears her throat, which is probably not actually a good sign. “Mine’s going to be about the political undercurrent of Eurovision and how it demonstrates the political and social climate of Europe through-out the competition.”

There’s a beat of dead silence as everyone lets that settle in.

“Eurovision?” Clint, a vet student who took the class purely for shits and giggles, asks with a hand up to his ear, as if he thinks he misheard and needs to adjust the settings on his hearing aids.

“Yes.” Says Natasha, deadly serious. “Eurovision.”

Steve barely has a moment to think about how flat his essay subject (the collaborative nature of design in order to get the correct feeling across) feels in comparison to that, when Bucky grabs his arm with entirely too much force.

“ _Steve._ ” He hisses, his eyes painfully wide. “She likes _Eurovision_.”

Steve realises, with crushing finality, that even though the rest of the class has moved on from the moment he was now stuck with Bucky Barnes, the grandson of Romanian immigrants and the sort of overzealous Australian that loved Europop just a tad too much, and he was now going to be insufferable for at least an hour.

“Well, isn’t that something.” Steve says, as every Eurovision memory from their childhood came rushing back with startling clarity.

+++

“How’s your scene work going?” Steve asks Bucky when they’re both in Steve’s kitchen eating 2 minute noodles and waiting for Steve’s mum to come home from work. Steve had gone fine with the monologue assessment the week before, but he wasn’t in the class with scene work and all he knew was that Bucky had been suspiciously quiet about the whole thing in the past week and Steve was starting to get concerned.

“As fine as anything can ever be.” Bucky says, not looking up from his noodles.

“Okay Hamlet, chill your grill.” Steve kicks him gently. Bucky scoffs slightly.

“Fine, fine.” He shrugs one shoulder. “It’s fine. It’s just The Hunger Games thing. It’s muddling up my head. Can’t get my lines straight when I’m still trying to work out how to make Fox Face fashionable.”

“You’re doing fine.” Steve pokes Bucky’s arm with his fork. Bucky squawks. “C’mon, Buck, you’ve got this down pat.”

“Yeah.” Bucky gives him a tiny smile. It makes something in Steve’s chest feel very warm. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

+++

Bucky, very distantly, is pretty sure he’s on the verge of a very dramatic mental breakdown.

 _‘_ _Everything you do is dramatic.’_ Says the tiny Becca that lives in his head that normally only pipes up to keep him grounded. In the moment, however, it mostly just makes him feel homesick and as if his skin is a couple of sizes too small for his body. He feels exposed. Painfully small.

He sits in the corner of the foyer area, in front of the mini-fridge, and presses his back against the exposed brick of the wall. Hard. He pulls his knees up and wraps his arms around them. He tells himself, firmly, that he’s only going to sit there for a minute.

He taps each of his fingers against the pads of his thumbs in rotation, both hands moving in sync. He likes to pretend he hasn’t practised this. He breathes. He thinks _‘If one of my friends came in right now, I would burst into tears right in front of them’_ And then he thinks _‘maybe that would do me some good’_

He then tries very hard not to think about how cathartic it would be to go into full screaming hysterics at someone about how high his stress levels have been lately, and instead tries to remember any of the breathing exercises he’s seen on the internet in the past. He remembers something vague about 5 and 7. Or was it 7 and 9? 5 and 8? He loses track of time thinking about it, but he’s pretty sure everyone else in the class is running late, including Thomas the Lecturer. The longer he sits there the more it feels like crying on someone’s shoulder ( _Steve,_ he thinks, _I’d be okay with crying on Steve_ ) is the easier option.

So of course, this is when Thor walks into the room.

Bucky likes Thor, very much so, but Thor is also not at all the sort of person Bucky ever wants to appear weak in front of. Thor has an aura about him, almost as if he radiates sunshine at all possible times, and it’s not the sort of personality Bucky wants to sully with something as small as a stress induced mental break.

Instead he takes a deep breath, tells his brain to back down for a minute, and stands up to greet Thor with the most charming smile he can muster.

“Well good morning starshine.” Bucky grins. “What’re you doing here?”

“Maaate.” Thor drawls at him. Thor starts most sentences with the word ‘mate’, regardless of how the sentence is going to go beyond that. Bucky grounds his immediate thoughts in the consistency of Thor’s entire being. “Just thought I’d say hi before class, since I’m already here with Loki.”

This is when, speak of the devil, Loki trails in with Darcy, who is very obnoxiously sucking on a thickshake.

Loki’s nice enough, but he gives Bucky weird vibes. He can’t place it, he just knew that if it came down to it, he would rather cut off his left arm than show any kind of weakness around Thor’s emo mess of a younger brother.

“G’day.” Darcy drawls. She is the only person Bucky knows without a Southern Cross tattoo who says that word unironically. He breathes. “You okay?”

“Peachy keen.” He winks. Loki rolls his eyes. Thor’s smile, impossibly, brightens. The man puts a summer day to shame. “Design’s kicking my ass, though.” Admitting this is probably the closest he’s going to get to his highly cathartic admission scenario for the foreseeable future.

“Bruh.” Darcy snorts. “You should try Social Science. It’ll boil your brain.”

+++

“Steve-”

“Do not speak to me.” Steve says around the string of gold Christmas beads dangling out of his mouth. It’s three days before their Hunger Games fashion parade, and they’ve both been holed up in Bucky’s room working on their projects for a good 20 hours already. “I’ve stabbed myself 5 times in the past hour, I’m not afraid to stab you too.”

“You can’t stab me in my own house.” Bucky mumbles, hot gluing another square mirror tile onto the black shirt in front of him. “It’s in the house rules.”

“You’re speaking to me.” Steve says by way of reply, stabbing another hole through the layers of gaff tape in his hands.

+++

“Is anyone else concerned for their health?” Falsworth asks the room at large. Bucky and Steve had just made their fifth kitchen run, this time leaving with only a jumbo sized container of gumballs and enough coffee to cause several heart attacks.

“They’ll be right.” Morita waves a hand vaguely as he continues reading his medical textbook. Falsworth tries to ignore the irony of the situation. “At least if they die they’ll die together.”

“Here here.” Says Gabe from his spot upside down on the couch. He shoves another Shape into his mouth. Falsworth sighs and goes back to his book.

+++

Bucky models his own design, which features a light up neck piece and a good 500 word explanation in his folio as to why the mirror squares on his shirt represent power cells. Steve somehow manages to get Doreen to agree to wear a gaff tape corset and a blonde wig, while also holding true to his original statement of throwing glitter at her before sending her on stage.

They both get High Distinctions and Bucky sleeps for a solid 18 hours after he finds out due to pure relief.

+++

Bucky gets a Facebook message two days later while he’s busy trying to learn lines for his Australian scene work. It’s from Foggy, sent to a brand new group chat that consists entirely of the two of them, plus Doreen Green.

 _“Hey Bucky!”_ The message starts, and somewhere in the back of his mind Bucky realises that this is probably not going to end how he expects it to. “S _o, Doreen and I have been thinking...”_

+++

“Okay.” Doreen says, chin resting on her steepled fingers. “Worst person you’ve ever had a crush on, three two one go.”

“Easy.” Foggy scoffs. “Marci.”

“Oh don’t be mean.” Doreen scolds, but she’s smiling.

Bucky is pretty sure that, when he agreed to have a ‘Study Session’ with the two of them, he’d expected a lot more studying to happen.

This does not mean that he doesn’t appreciate the break.

“No, no, you see, she’s great and all, but she’s also secretly the devil.” Foggy nods sagely. “It’s why she wears heels all the time. Keeps her far enough away from the ground to avoid getting sucked back into her natural realm.”

“You’re just mad she’s got nicer hair than you.” Bucky sniggers. Foggy gasps dramatically.

“You take that _back_!”

“Anyway,” Doreen interrupts. She doesn’t even flinch when Foggy throws a chip at her face, just catches it and dips it in sour cream before it can get a grease smudge on her textbook. “Bucky, worst crush, go.”

“Uh.” He scratches his head, thinking back on all the people he’s liked. Then, bingo. “High school. Dude named Brock. We spoke to each other twice a month to antagonise each other, but sometimes I made a joke and he would laugh, so I thought we were destined to love each other or something. On one school trip we stayed at a hostel and he spent the whole morning shoving napkins into his coffee until someone paid attention to him.”

The other two blink for a moment.

“You sure know how to pick ‘em, Barnes.” Foggy smiles.

“I was _fifteen._ ”

“Still.” Foggy beams. “So, the napkins made him the worst, or the antagonising?”

“Oh, no, that I could deal with.” Bucky shudders at the memory. “He made gay jokes. All the time. Really, really shitty ones too.”

Doreen blinks and suddenly has her Sad Eyes on, which, no. Not the intended outcome of this conversation.

“He had great hair but a shitty personality, no big deal.” Bucky shrugs. “But, jokes on him, I only got hotter and he has a weird moustache now.”

“You are a gem of a man.” Foggy declares. Bucky preens.

“Okay, okay, my one…” Doreen bites her lip for a second, thinking. “Um… Okay, definitely during first term. I had a thing for…” She pauses to shudder. “ _Logan._ ”

“No way.” Bucky says in disbelief. Foggy audibly gasps.

Logan was a student at the Uni, although no one actually knew what he was studying. Bucky knew of him because, most days, he could be found idling in the TV Land car park on an obnoxiously huge black bike to pick up Scott Summers, who apparently hated the lifts as much as Logan did but got on the bike anyway. You could almost always smell Logan (who had a penchant for fixing up greasy problem cars, smoking, and rolling around in dead grass instead of using deodorant, apparently) from the second you stepped out of class.

Doreen blushes.

“Ew.” Says Foggy, who had told Bucky _not last week_ that he thought Logan was kinda hot despite the smell, and was therefore a goddamn liar. “Doreen, darling, what were you thinking?”

“He had a bike and I’d never seen a man with that many muscles before?” She phrases it like a question, as if she’s seeking approval for her reasons.

“Fair.” Bucky shrugs. Foggy stares at the table for a second before nodding.

"He may have the personality of an irritated dingo," Foggy adds sagely, suddenly the paragon of hot guy related wisdom. "But he looks like Hugh Jackman, and that'd make anyone weak at the knees."

"Amen to that." Doreen finishes, holding up both hands for a threeway high-five. Bucky's not sure why this deserves a high-five, but he's never one to leave a friend hanging, so he and Foggy oblige.

+++

They end up calling their group chat _‘The Study Buddies’_ and when Bucky tells Steve he just smiles, stupidly soft, and it makes Bucky’s heart hurt in ways he can’t describe.

+++

“Hey.” Bucky says a few days later, his eyebrows furrowed as he scrolls Facebook, and something very close to laughter in his voice. “Does Tony live on campus?”

“I don’t think so.” Steve shrugs as he continues sketching. Bucky’s not allowed to see the drawing until it’s done, since he apparently jinxes any drawing he looks at before completion. “He said something once about his parents buying an apartment in town. I think they wanted him to be self-sufficient. Why?”

As an answer Bucky holds out his phone, which shows a picture of Doreen, Bruce Banner, and Tony with a cat-sized robot on wheels. On one side of the robot there’s a sticker that says “HAMPTONS KITCHEN CSU” in block letters. Steve blinks at it.

“Did he...” He finds that he can’t really wrap his mind around what he’s seeing. For some reason the fact that Bruce, a medical student, was somehow involved in this process made Tony’s possible construction methods all the more concerning. Bucky’s on the verge of laughter. “Did he steal kitchen supplies from a building he doesn’t even live in so he could build a robot?”

“That definitely appears to be the case.”

“Fair fucking dinkum.” Steve sighs. Bucky loses his mind laughing.

+++

It isn’t until two weeks later on the Monday after the mid-year break starts (“FIVE WEEKS!” Sam had yelled, hands thrown above his head in victory. “I am going to sleep _so much_ and there will be _no one to stop me._ ” Bucky very firmly agreed with the sentiment) that Bucky remembers that very few people at Uni actually lived in Wagga.

“How can you forget something like that?” Steve laughs, hunched over a bacon and egg roll in the café that had become their third home once the weather had started getting colder.

“I don’t know!” Bucky’s trying very hard not to gesticulate too much for fear he’d knock over one of bookshelves full of artfully stacked tea cups. “You spend enough time with people you forget they all have homes to go to in the break.”

“Are your house mates staying?”

“Dum Dum and Falsworth are staying the whole time, and they’re probably going to murder each other without the others as a buffer.” Bucky laments. “The rest of them are going home for at least half of it.”

“So it’s just gunna be you and me then.” Steve shrugs, casual as you like. “It’ll be like when we were kids.”

“Does that mean I get to shove your face in dirt a second time around?” Bucky asks. Steve snorts.

“More like a sixth time around.” Steve kicks him under the table. Bucky’s pretty sure they’ve both developed permanent shin bruises from how often they do that. “And only if you want my mother to get mad at you.”

“Then it’ll be _exactly_ like old times.” Bucky smiles as Steve laughs again, and tries to hide how fond he feels behind another gulp of his jaffa hot chocolate.

+++

There’s a point about two weeks into the holidays where, with seemingly no catalyst and not a jot of input from Bucky, Steve gets into a huge fight while at the _Romano’s Hotel_ bar one night and ends up on Bucky’s doorstep at 2am with a black eye and bloody knuckles.

“Oh, Steve.” Bucky sighs, even as he feels his chest constrict, and watches as Steve flinches slightly at his tone. “What did you do?”

“You should see the other guy.” Steve tries to smile, but it clearly hurts to do so. “Can I come in?”

“Of course you can.” Bucky steps back so Steve can walk in to the house proper. He makes a beeline for Bucky’s room. “You absolute fuck head.” Bucky mutters, even as he’s grabbing the first aid kit from the kitchen and following Steve, just like he has before, just like he probably will again.

+++

“You know,” Bucky says, when he’s finished wrapping Steve’s knuckles and given him and ice pack for his eye and the silence between them has stretched on so long it’s started to feel thick. “When I said these holidays would be like old times, I didn’t think you’d take it this far.”

“I didn’t mean to.” Steve sighs, and it takes all of two seconds for him to realise that it was probably the wrong thing to say.

“You obviously meant it at some point.” Bucky snaps the lid of the first aid kit shut. Steve tries not to wince at the noise. “I thought you were over this.”

“Over what?”

“Fighting everything that moved.”

“He was being a dickhead. I called him out.” Steve needs Bucky to understand this, needs him to understand the itch Steve felt under his skin when he had a chance to right a wrong. “I’ve never stopped doing that.”

“I thought you’d be smart enough not to start chucking punches anymore.” Bucky says. He’s not looking at Steve, his face hidden behind his undone hair.

The silence between them stretches again, prickling against his skin like a chill. He’s never felt cold around Bucky before.

“Do you remember that story your dad used to tell us?” Steve asks to break the silence, picking at a stray thread on the ripped knee of his jeans.

“He told us a lot of stories.” Bucky shrugs, and if the change of subject surprises him then he doesn’t let on. “He still tells most of them.”

“The one about the dumpster.” Steve’s resolutely staring at the thread on his knee, but he still sees Bucky freeze slightly. “He always told it after we got into fights. But I.” He swallows. “I forgot the details.”

“ _You_ got into the fights.” Bucky says, after a beat. “ _I_ just got you out of them.”

“Buck.”

Bucky exhales, looks up to the ceiling like he’s thinking, then down to the ground like he’s just as keen to avoid eye contact as Steve is. He sits on the bed next to Steve and tucks his legs up underneath himself.

“When dad was a kid, he was super skinny.” Bucky starts. His hands are pressed together in his lap. “Just a beanpole of a kid, and since it was New Zealand in the 60’s all the big tall guys at high school would pick on him. Throw him around, all that stuff. Then, one year, he spent the whole summer working on his family’s farm, hauling hay bales.” He huffs a laugh. “Ridiculous thing, this skinny kid throwing hay around for a whole goddamn summer, but that’s what he did. He didn’t look that different, at the end, but he was. He goes back to school and these kids, all of them brick shit houses, they look too big to be teenagers. And they crowd dad, like they had before, and they try to chuck him in a dumpster.”

“And then?” Steve prompts when Bucky trails off. Bucky sighs.

“And then dad picks up these bullies, who’d tormented him for years, and he throws all four of them in the dumpster instead.” Bucky looks up at Steve. “You can’t fight your way out of everything, Steve.”

Steve shrugs. “I can try.”

“And I’ll just have to keep picking up the pieces?” Bucky sounds like he wants to be angry but he’s too tired to put any heart in it. “Cause I don’t think any of dad’s stories were about picking a fight with a dude at Roms because he called dad names.”

“He was flinging slurs in my face, Buck.” Steve snaps. “Don’t tell me that wouldn’t make you angry!”

“Yeah, it would, Steve.” Bucky snaps back, but there’s no bite. It almost makes Steve feel worse that Bucky’s not madder about the whole thing. “It’d make me fucking furious. But I wouldn’t get kicked out of Roms for knocking the guys’ teeth out.”

“It was half a tooth at most-”

“That’s not the _point._ ” Bucky buries his face in his hands and it feels fragile, exhausted. Steve can’t imagine what happened to make Bucky resigned to this. “I know what it’s like Steve. I’ve been out as bi since I was fifteen, okay? I’ve heard it. Way more than you ever have. And I’ve never started a goddamn brawl. This is Wagga. You’ve got to learn what to fight and what to let slide, cause if you pick every battle then you’re never going to stop.”

Bucky pauses and massages his temples, and Steve feels as if his voice is stuck, _I’m bi too, let me help, be outraged, you’re allowed, you deserve to rage, fight back fight back let me help-_ sticking to his tongue and refusing to be let free.

“I’m not telling you to stop, Steve. God knows that’s never worked.” Bucky continues, weary, and not for the first time Steve feels bad for dragging his sorry ass to Bucky’s doorstep. “I’m just asking you to pick your battles, for my peace of mind if nothing else. Can you do that?” He swallows. “Please?”

Steve doesn’t know what to say to that, still can’t speak around all the words trapped in his throat. Instead he reaches out and holds Bucky’s hand. He can feel Bucky looking at him, confused and tired and maybe a little sad, but after a second he squeezes Steve’s hand and threads their fingers together, grounding him.

“You’re a fucking idiot.” Bucky whispers as Steve finally lets exhaustion kick in and leans his head against Bucky’s shoulder. “A noble, self-sacrificing, righteous _idiot_.” He leans his head gently against Steve’s, his thumb rubbing soothing circles on the back of Steve’s hand, and Steve just tries to let the warmth from Bucky’s touch sink in.

+++

Falsworth is well into his Saturday tradition of making everyone in the house a ‘good, proper English breakfast’ when he hears a loud squawking noise from outside Bucky’s room.

He leans around the doorway and into the hallway that branches off into all their rooms and sees Gabe and Morita standing in front of Bucky’s open door, hands clutched over their mouths in glee. Apparently, something was happening that had interrupted _their_ Saturday ritual of waking Bucky up early so he could appreciate the proper English breakfast. It was the last time they’d all do this before the new session started, so obviously it had to be something Very Important. He sets the fry pan full of sausages and eggs to low heat and goes to investigate.

“What on earth is going on?” He hisses, knowing full well that if any of them wake Dernier up before his alarm does then they’re dead men walking. Morita gestures at Bucky’s room with a flap. Falsworth sighs and looks in and promptly feels his jaw drop.

Sometime during the night Bucky had acquired a Steve and the two of them were curled up on Bucky’s bed, Steve’s (very bruised, how did he get that black eye, _what on earth happened last night-_ ) head is pillowed on Bucky’s chest. He’s drooling onto Bucky’s red henley. One of Bucky’s arms is wrapped around Steve protectively. They’re holding hands.

“Well then.” Falsworth whispers. Gabe and Morita appear to be having very silent joy induced heart attacks. “Looks like I’d better put more food on.”

+++

When Dum Dum walks out to breakfast it is to the rousing sounds of Bucky indignantly whisper-shrieking “ _It was platonic!_ ” to a giggling audience of fully grown men, and is immediately followed by a battered looking Steve Rogers exiting the bathroom and taking a place at the table.

 _‘Glad I was asleep for that.’_ Dum Dum thinks, and helps himself to extra bacon.

+++

They try to put off telling Steve’s mum as long as possible.

It still does not go very well.

“All these years!” She’s not in a rage. Bucky’s pretty sure Sarah Rogers’ slender body is not physically capable of containing something as negatively charged as rage. But she’s doing a pretty decent job of being almost enraged, and it’s just as scary to behold. “Steven Grant Rogers, all these years I have been telling you to stay out of fights!”

“I know, mum.” Steve mumbles. Neither of them had been particularly terrible as children, but Bucky had always tried to take most of the blame for fights and Steve had the benefit of a perfected kicked puppy face. His mum probably hadn’t yelled at him like this since the two of them were in single digit ages.

“I don’t think you do, Steven.” She’s very angrily making dinner. Bucky’s pretty sure half the reason neither of them are crying yet is because at least half of her frustration is being taken out on some very unfortunate chicken fillets. “Because if any of what I’ve said in the past had stuck you wouldn’t have gotten into a _scrap_ at a _pub!_ ”

“He was an asshole, Mrs Rogers.” Bucky chimes in, because even if he’s mad at Steve he still feels like defending him. Mrs Rogers glares at him. “I mean a bigot. Ma’am.”

“I am aware that my son’s reasons were noble, James.” She says. Her gaze shifts back to Steve, who is looking very hard at the lino tiled floor. “This does not change the fact that he’s gone and gotten himself _hurt_.” Her voice cracks, ever so slightly, and she turns back to the chicken and starts cutting it with far more force than necessary.

“I’m sorry, mum.” Steve says quietly.

Bucky remembers being small, fresh from a fight he hadn’t started and scared of being reprimanded, and Steve had looked up at his mum and said those exact words, and her face had softened. Steve had a lot of his mothers’ features, her hair and her mouth and her cheeks. The eyes were his dad’s, Bucky knew that from photos, but when you looked at Steve you knew in a heartbeat that he belonged to Sarah Rogers, always and forever, and she could never ever stay mad at what was hers.

“I know, Steve.” She says, her eyes closed for a moment. “Just… Try not to get into more fights, okay?”

“Bucky already made me promise that.” Steve half smiles, obviously trying to lift the mood. Sarah sighs something that might be a laugh.

“Well, if Bucky can’t make you do it, then I don’t know who can.” She says, and when she looks over to Bucky he knows that she means it, heart and soul. “May Bucky’s influence save all of our blood pressure. You’ve iced your eye, right?”

“All night, Mrs Rogers.” Bucky chimes in. The air feels too thick. “Except for when we alternated. You are meant to alternate with black eyes, right?”

“Oh, James.” She sighs softly, even though that doesn’t answer his question. When he looks to Steve all he gets is a fond looking smile that makes him feel as if his skin is slightly too small, but not in the same way panic does. She looks back at Steve suddenly. “Did your glasses survive the scuffle at least, honey?”

“Glasses?” Bucky says, and watches as Steve’s ears go very pink. “You need glasses? I haven’t seen you wear any since we were kids.”

“Well, I, um-” Steve stutters.

“ _Steven._ ” His mother says, although this time the disapproval has a hint of humour underneath it. “Why does this not surprise me?”

“ _Mum._ ”

+++

Steve’s black eye had already started fading to a sickly yellow-green when Bucky took him out for lunch and then immediately proceeded to spend a good half hour stabbing at his phone in an increasingly distressed manner.

“What is it?” Steve asks, already halfway through a bacon and egg roll. (Their main café made what Steve considered to be the best bacon and egg rolls in the world, and because of all the time off from Uni he was very swiftly on his way to be completely addicted.)

“Nothing.” Bucky takes a deep breath, turns his phone off, and looks at Steve. “Your shiner looks gross.”

“Your face is gross.” Steve shoots back, because he’s an adult.

“How can you tell that when you’re not wearing your glasses?”

“I’m going to punch you in the face.” Steve says with absolutely no heat. “So hard.”

“I’m quaking in my boots.” Bucky says, with equally flat inflection, and the afternoon continues as if nothing had ever been wrong.

+++

 _“Bucky was acting weird today”_ Steve texts Peggy later, when the image of Bucky’s face as he’d looked at his phone refused to leave his mind.

 _“He’s an actor Steve.”_ She replies and Steve can almost physically see her eyes rolling. “ _Is there a time when he /isn’t/ acting weird?”_

_“Point”_

+++

Halfway through the holidays the head Acting teacher sends out an email saying _“Due to unavoidable circumstances, Thomas has had to take medical anxiety leave and will not be returning to the University. The new Acting Lecturer will be Nicholas Porter. Please be nice to him. Regards, John.”_

“Wow.” Steve says when he reads the email. He looks over at Bucky.

“If you say anything about this being caused by how annoying actors are, I _will_ hurt you.” Bucky doesn’t look up from his laptop, just points at Steve accusingly.

“I wasn’t going to say anything like that.”

“You’re a terrible liar Steven.”

+++

Steve’s birthday was the week before new session started, which meant that approximately no one from either of their degree’s was in town for it.

“I thought Tony lived in town?” Bucky asks, setting plates of party food out on the coffee table in Steve’s living room. Even if there wasn’t much of a party to speak of Steve’s mum still refused to let it pass without some kind of celebration.

“He went back to America.” Steve shrugs, and blows up another balloon that approximately 3 people will see. “I asked. He doesn’t come back till Sunday.”

“No one else is back early?” Bucky was talking perfectly calmly, but Steve was 90% sure that Bucky was secretly heartbroken about this. Steve, in all honesty, didn’t really care. “I could’ve dragged Dum Dum and Falsworth along if you’d told me.”

“I don’t care, Buck.” Steve sighs. “I’ve got you and mum and enough balloons to keep us entertained for several hundred years. I don’t need anything or anyone else.”

This is, of course, when the doorbell rings.

“What?” Steve says at the same time that his mum comes zooming out of the kitchen chirping “They’re here!”

“Who’s here?” Steve asks. She opens the door instead of answering and Steve is suddenly faced with-

“Steve!” Thor yells by way of greeting. Next to him, Loki is holding a slightly ridiculous looking stack of presents in his arms. Steve’s mum leads the two of them into the living room and beams.

“Hi.” Loki chimes in. Thor has bypassed Steve’s mum and has pulled him into the sort of hug that would’ve broken him in half when he was twelve. “So, our parents know each other.”

“What?” Bucky asks, since Steve is still trying to recover his breath after being loved to death.

“Frigga and I go to the same book club.” His mum says innocently. Steve cannot believe this. “I mentioned that not many people from your class were in town for your birthday and she said she’d send her boys along.” She looks around at all the men in the room, all of them at least a foot taller than her, and claps her hands happily. “I’ll go finish the cake.” She gives them one last blinding smile and leaves for the kitchen.

They all stand in silence.

“Can I put these down now?” Loki asks, using his eyes to gesture at the pile of presents.

“Oh, yeah, sure.” Steve rearranges the food on the table so there’s a corner for Loki to set the gifts down. Steve can’t handle the idea that the two of them bought him this many gifts on such short notice. “I didn’t know you lived in Wagga.”

“Course we do mate!” Thor says and drops dramatically onto the sofa. After a second, Bucky perches on the arm of the sofa. “In Springvale, near the guy who owns all the Maccas around town.”

 _‘Ah, the rich people part of town.’_ Steve thinks, a little hysterically, as Loki settles himself on the other sofa and looks around curiously. _‘That makes. So much sense.’_

+++

In a turn of events that surprises literally everyone, they actually have a really good time.

It takes a good twenty minutes, but Thor mentions off hand that he’d done a photography assessment in the park a couple of streets down from Steve’s and suddenly it all devolves into artist talk and Thor’s photography page.

“He does good stuff.” Loki says, and he doesn’t even sound begrudging. “Show them the space ones.”

Which is how they end up looking through Thor’s entire Facebook folder of star photography. It’s stunning, and looking at how the colours of the sky mix together makes Steve wish he was better at watercolours.

“How do you get shots like that?” Bucky asks, craning around Steve so he can see.

“It’s pretty easy out here.” Thor shrugs. “No light pollution. The cities are shit for it.”

“Too right.” Loki agrees, which is the most colloquial Steve has ever heard him be. “Helps that his girlfriend’s nutty about the stars.”

“You have a girlfriend?” Steve asks, then feels bad. He’s known Thor for five months at this point. He should probably know that he has a girlfriend.

Thor just ducks his head slightly.

“Jane. She’s doing a Bachelor of Science, she wants to be an astrophysicist.” He smiles, all soft. On the other arm of the sofa, Loki leans around so only Steve and Bucky can see him and sticks his tongue out in fake disgust. If Steve hadn’t already been sitting down he would’ve fallen over.

“Cake time!” His mum yells. She appears in the kitchen doorway with the cake, a giant slab of lamington sponge with nineteen candles and some sparklers stuck in the top, and she beams. “Sing, sing!”

Steve gets sung Happy Birthday by his best friend, his over-zealous mother, and a pair of brothers he’d never even expected to turn up. He maybe, kind of, loves it.

+++

“How’d you find people with Norse armour for those battle photos?” Bucky asks, a hand held in front of his mouth so he can talk with cake in his mouth and not get told off.

“I’m part of the local LARP club.” Thor says proudly. This particular statement is such a curveball that Bucky nearly drops the paper plate in his hand. “Sometimes I just takes pictures of them for shits and gigs, you know? Especially when they wanna update their profiles, or when I need shit for my folio.”

Thor picks up his phone and goes into a special folder in his photos called “THE WARRIORS THREE (PLUS SIF)” and passes it to Bucky.

“Holy shit.” Bucky says, scrolling through HD photo after HD photo of Thor’s friends with swords, jumping out of trees and standing on top of imposing looking rocks. “Steve, check this.”

Steve wanders in from the kitchen where he’d been making tea and, presumably, been listening to his mother and Loki have a conversation. Steve’s mother was very good at picking out the one kid in a room who needed the most mothering and then smothering them in affection.

“Holy shit.” Steve says when Bucky shows him the photos. Thor looks slightly bashful about their praise. “Oh my god. These are amazing. These are your friends?”

“Yes.” Thor is so fiercely proud in that one moment that it makes Bucky feel strangely at peace. People came, people went, but Thor had his passion for those he cared about was, apparently, a universal constant. “They’re amazing.”

“Wait.” Steve’s eyebrows furrow as he swipes to another photo. “Is that you?” He turns the phone around and there, standing atop the rocky ledges that lived scattered around Wagga Beach, was a man who was probably Thor, except it couldn’t be because the Thor they knew had never been seen in a dramatic red cape and shining silver armour with his blond hair flying around his face. Bucky, in that moment, felt as if he were looking at something mythical.

(This may have been his lingering crush on Thor making a late and ill-timed appearance, but that is neither here nor there.)

“Yes.” Thor nods and actually blushes. He’s in a Letterman jersey and jeans. Bucky almost feels like the armour suits him more. “Sif took that.”

“Where did you get the _cape_?” Bucky asks. Partially because he wants Thor to feel comfortable, partially because he never knew how badly he wanted a cape until _this very moment_ and Thor’s looks _amazing_.

“I made it.” He beams, still kind of pink in the face, but proud of his achievements all the same. “From mum’s old curtains.”

“Your mum had curtains that looked like that?” Steve raises an eyebrow. It’s a very valid question. Even in a photo as dramatic as the one they’re looking at, it’s easy to tell that the cape is made of something more expensive than either of them had ever experienced.

“She’s a very classy lady.” Thor explains, as if that really explains anything.

Then again, this is a family that brought Loki into existence, and he’d worn $400 jackets to class at least twice, so it did sort of make sense.

“Lokes’s costume is better.” Thor grabs his phone back and skips forward about five photos to land on one of him and Loki together in a forest. Loki’s in black and green, a gold sceptre in one hand, and the horned crown that he occasionally wore to class (“It’s an _aesthetic choice-_ ” “It’s ridiculous is what it is”) finally looked at home with the rest of his ensemble. Photo Thor is wearing a helmet with little wings on the sides. Somehow, that doesn’t make him look absurd. “See?”

“The degree lost a great designer when he chose acting.” Bucky concedes. The costume is almost as amazing as the fact that Bucky now knows that Thor calls his brother ‘Lokes’.

“Have you opened the presents yet?” Steve’s mum asks from the kitchen doorway. Behind her Loki looks mildly dazed, which is a common side effect of being mothered by Sarah Rogers. “My camera’s charged, let’s open presents!”

+++

It turns out most of the presents Thor and Loki got where art supplies. Considering the fact they’d only ever seen him draw when he was bored at lunch, it makes Steve feel strangely choked up. The other present they give him is a white button up shirt with black detailing and a feature collar, and from the second he touches the fabric he can tell it costs more than the entirety of his current wardrobe.

This means he’s riding pretty high when he turns to his mum, only to see her sharing a conspiring look with Bucky.

“Bucky and I are giving you a joint gift this year.” She grins and looks at her watch. “Which should be here in three, two…”

There’s a knock at the door.

+++

The idea to bring Peggy Carter down to Wagga for Steve’s birthday had been a joint effort in that Steve’s mum had said “I do wish Peggy could be here for him” one day while Bucky was over and Steve wasn’t in the room, and after asking enough questions to work out who the hell Peggy was Bucky had offered to help that come true. He’s a good person like that.

All three of them had pooled resources to make it possible, but Bucky had been the one to work out a solution when Peggy’s boss had tried to force her into working a shift the day of the party, and when the boss had tried to do it _again_ after Steve got a black eye, and he’d even managed to wrangle it so she could check into her motel early so she could get ready without stress, all while keeping it a secret from Steve.

He had, basically, been ripping his hair out for most of the holidays while Mrs Rogers made him endless cups of hot chocolate and told him what to do when everything got extra stressful. It had not been the most relaxing time of his life.

All of this is entirely worth it when he sees Steve’s face as Peggy walks into the living room, everything about her pristine and organised and beautiful to a goddamn fault, resplendent in a blue dress and curled hair. Steve looks as if he may cry.

(It is in this moment, watching Steve cling to Peggy like he’s scared she’ll disappear, seeing how Steve’s whole face lights up like a firework display with how happy he is, hearing the pure reverence in Steve’s voice when he thanks Bucky for doing this _“Thank you, Buck, I had no idea, thank you thank you-”_ that Bucky realises that he may be in love with his best friend.

He may be a lot in love with his best friend.

 _Fuck_.)

+++

Bucky goes out for lunch with Steve and his Sydney friend the day after Steve’s birthday, and then locks himself in his room and blasts very loud music until his first class back at Uni on Wednesday.

“Is he okay?” Morita asks after Bucky has made one of his rare appearances to grab food.

“Steve issues.” Dernier shakes his head.

“Ah.” Morita nods and resumes his book. “Let me know if I have to break anyone’s legs in Bucks honour.”

“Gotcha.”

+++

Peggy catches the midnight train back to Sydney on Wednesday night. Bucky had played the Journey song the entire time he had driven them in his car, just to keep the mood light.

Whether or not that had worked was up for debate, but Steve had yet to start crying, so he was counting it as a win.

+++

Peggy Carter is not an idiot.

She knows this. Steve knows this. Anyone who has known Peggy Carter for longer than two seconds knows this.

So she’s not really sure why it takes until she’s saying good-bye to Steve at the train station for him to realise that she knows he’s got a crush on Bucky.

“He’s a good choice.” She whispers when she’s hugging Steve. Bucky is standing by her luggage looking awkward in his puffy vest jacket and long sleeves, but he’s there, and that speaks multitudes.

“What?” Steve asks, and when she raises an eyebrow at him all he does is look shocked. “Peg, I don’t-”

“I’m not an idiot, Steve.”

“Of course you’re not.”

“Then why the face?”

“I-” Steve stutters a little bit, looking anywhere except at her face, and he’s never been more transparent than in this moment. It’s sweet, in a frustrating kind of way, which… sums Steve’s life up in a scarily succinct kind of way. “How do you-”

“He’s a good choice.” Peggy repeats. She kisses Steve on the cheek and leaves a perfect red kiss mark behind. He smiles at her.

“I’m gunna miss you Peggy.”

“Well of course.” She smiles. She loves Steve, but god knows she’s not going to cry in front of him. “Who else is there to keep you in check?”

They both seem to mutually decide not to look over at Bucky. This is probably for the best.

+++

Steve has come to expect many things in life to be a bit beyond his comprehension. Most of these things tend to be happening whenever he has to pick Bucky up from a Study Buddies session.

(This tends to be whenever Bucky’s car has Something Wrong with it, which generally means all his tires need replacing and he can’t be fucked changing them himself.)

He’s not sure why, but a part of him had assumed that the by including Bucky in the equation it meant that there was a certain level of stern-faced commitment added to their study sessions. When Steve says this to Bucky the response he gets is a solid two minutes of hysterical laughter.

“Have you met me?” Bucky had wheezed, tears in the corners of his eyes. “Have you seen my home videos? I learned how to backflip instead of studying for my trial HSC. _Stern-faced_ , Jesus fucking Christ.”

This is why when Steve opens the door to Student Space one rainy day in late July he’s not nearly as surprised as he should be to see Bucky leading Doreen through a fast paced waltz around the room, occasionally throwing in a double turn or a tricky leap, while Foggy sits on a table and claps their beat.

Steve sighs and closes the door.

“What is that?” Doreen laughs when Bucky does some complicated pseudo-grapevine and picks Doreen up to spin her around.

“New steps! New Steps!” Foggy chimes in, nasal and twangy. Steve laughs.

“Hey Steve!” Doreen waves, right before Bucky picks her up and rests her on his shoulder. She shrieks but doesn’t fall.

“Buck, you said you’d help me with my Bogo Pogo.” Steve deadpans the one line from _Strictly Ballroom_ that he remembers with any clarity, which makes Foggy laugh so hard he loses the rhythm.

Bucky beams, eyes crinkling at the corners, and he helps Doreen back to the ground. She goes down with a surprising amount of grace considering the fact she’s laughing so hard she’s barely making any noise.

“Steve.” Bucky poses dramatically, a hand held out in Steve’s direction. “Dance with me at the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix.”

“Careful, he’ll use _new steps_ in front of _Barry Fife._ ” Doreen stage whispers. “He’ll embarrass you in front of _Tina Sparkle!_ ”

“I’ve only watched the movie once.” Steve admits, cheeks burning. It’s easier than admitting that he remembered all of the dance sequences with the startling clarity of someone with a life-long crush on Paul Mercurio, and the idea of Bucky looking at him like that, even as a joke ( _especially_ as a joke) made him want to curl into a ball and die somewhere.

“Steve!” Foggy gasps. Steve’s not sure how much of Foggy’s offence is a joke. “Bucky, you failed as a parent.”

“I only raised him part-time.” Bucky says haughtily, dropping his stance and walking to his bag. “I can’t answer for his behaviour.”

“A likely excuse.” Foggy sniffs. “You just don’t want to take responsibility.”

“I am right here.” Steve sighs, rolling his eyes.

“We know.” Doreen beams. Bucky shakes his head and looks to Steve with one of the secret kind of grins they’ve had since they were kids. Something about it makes Steve’s heart beat a tad faster.

“C’mon.” Steve gestures towards the door with a nod of his head. “I have to get you to your dance class before mum finishes work.”

“Bossiest taxi service in all of Wagga.” Bucky shakes his head. Steve punches him playfully in the arm. “Alright, alright. Let’s go work on that Bogo Pogo.”

“Don’t forget, you ball-change on the one!” Doreen yells as they exit, which causes Foggy to snort.

“What?” Steve raises an eyebrow.

“You really need to re-watch that movie, Stevie.” Bucky ruffles his hair. “Otherwise all the other parents will think badly of me.”

+++

Nicholas the lecturer turns out to be an ex-CSU student that had graduated the previous year. Steve’s pretty sure all of the actors would complain his lack of experience more if Nicholas didn’t alternate between wearing skinny jeans and sweats pants to class.

“I hate to see him leave but _goddamn_ I love to watch him go.” Scott Summers says, reverently, as the entire class sits on the amphitheatre steps outside the studio and watches Nicholas walk to the office building. Everyone looks at Scott. “What?”

When no one else is looking, Steve sees Wanda give Scott a high-five.

+++

Due to his Design elective Bucky ends up being a costume lackey for the third year actor’s production of _‘The Crucible’_. He spends a week sewing dark brown stripes onto light brown shirts when he _should_ be working on learning lines for his final performance, and then gets to spend most nights sitting backstage making sure no one rips any seams for two weeks. From what he can hear the third years are not completely butchering Arthur Miller’s work, but he’s also pretty sure he’s so sleep deprived that he can’t see straight, so he’s not 100% on that one.

The problem with this is that Bucky’s fuse is about 80% shorter than normal, and this does not end well for anyone.

+++

“Why do you hang out with them if they make you feel shitty?”

“Because most of the time I _don’t_ feel shitty!” Bucky snaps, a little bit. He’s trying his best to get into his car without causing a scene, but Steve won’t stop talking to him and his key won’t go into the lock and he _wishes_ Foggy had never even fucking messaged him. “Most of the time they’re great, it’s just that sometimes they make me want to claw their eyes out.”

Steve still looks put out about this, angry in a way Bucky doesn’t get.

“God, Steve. Most friendships are like that.” He wants this to be done. He wants the fact that he just ranted at Foggy about his bullshit feelings to not have happened. He wants Steve to stop looking at him like he wants to start a fight. “Do you have a friend who _doesn’t_ make you feel like shit occasionally?”

“Yes.” Steve says, his jaw set. “You.”

For a moment Bucky is floored into absolute stillness. Somewhere, deep in his chest, something aches so hard that it threatens to choke him with its sudden intensity.

“Now I know you’re talking shit.” Bucky laughs, a beat too late to be witty and too breathy to be genuine. Steve’s eyebrows furrow. “Because there ain’t no way I make you feel better than Sam does. The man puts saints to shame.”

“Bucky-”

“Leave it, Steve.” Bucky sighs, trying not to sound as desperate as he feels in that moment. He wants the day to _end_. “Please.”

And for once, miraculously, he does.

+++

Tony Stark does not _stalk_.

He _investigates_.

Rhodey has often referred to his investigations as “Compulsive background checks on all his friends”, but Rhodey doesn’t know what he’s talking about and Tony likes knowing as much as possible about his friends in case they turn on him and end up being part of an international spy syndicate, so, whatever.

This, when asked, is his main reason for spending 4 hours scrolling through an aesthetic blog on Tumblr.

An aesthetic blog that belongs to, of all goddamn people, _Bucky Barnes._

That fact alone is enough to bring Tony joy for the _rest of his life_.

The background is a pastel blue to purple gradient that is probably meant to be soothing, the font size is a shade too small, his star sign is in his bio, and every single post is meticulously tagged with the _feeling_ it gave Bucky upon viewing it. Tony is going to _die_.

(He is fully aware of the fact that Bucky has a main blog, which is a much more standard fare of shitty memes and posts from blogs dedicated to musical theatre. Tony knew these things about Bucky already. Investigation only counts if you learn something new.)

Tony is having a grand time scrolling Bucky’s blog when, in between a picture of a model with glitter painted on their regrowth and a piece of text art about flowers growing in the soul, he sees a post that says “ _I don’t know what to do”_ and is tagged with _#I thought I was over him,_ _#why does this hurt so much_ , and _#SGR_

Now, Tony Stark is not dumb. He does, in fact, think he has done quite enough to prove that he is a very smart person. As such, he has some pretty immediate suspicions as to what _#SGR_ means, but, as a true scientist, he knows he needs more data to be certain.

He clicks on the tag.

+++

Tony, in his infinite wisdom, freaks out for about the whole thing for only 30 seconds. This is enough time to:

  1. Attempt a panicked Skype call with Rhodey
  2. Remember the fact that it’s 3am in San Diego and Rhodey’s been asleep since 10:30pm
  3. End the Skype call like a good friend who remembers that time zones are a thing
  4. Send Rhodey a Facebook message anyway, because he wants to keep him updated when he does wake up and he’s a great friend like that
  5. But still. It’s only a 30 second freak out
  6. He’s doing rather well
  7. All things considered



Tony stops. He breathes. Then he starts a group chat with Bruce and Sam, since they seem the most likely of his friendship group to know what to do with the information Tony has stumbled upon in the endless purple landscape of Bucky’s blog.

 _“_ _so”_ Tony starts, flexing his fingers for a second before he continues. “ _i may or may not have stumbled across something i should not have stumbled across”_

 _“_ _If its nuclear codes then I really don’t want to know”_ Sam replies. Bruce sends a question mark, which is why he’s Tony’s favourite.

 _“_ _i’ve had those for years”_ Tony lies, just to keep Sam on his toes. “ _no, i may have stumbled across barnes’s super-secret blog and from there i may have found an absolute MULTITUDE of angsty posts about the fact that he’s_  
_get this_  
_secretly and painfully in love with STEVE”_

There are a solid 45 seconds where nothing happens except the notification telling him they’ve read his message.

 _“S_ _teve ROGERS”_ He sends, just in case there’s another Steve no-one’s told him about and the two of them are confused. _“Steven Grant Rogers. he tags them all like a weird dream journal of angsty word art and quotes about fate”_

 _“_ _Are you telling me it’s taken you this long to work out Bucky loves Steve?!?”_ Is Sam’s reply. Tony finds it a tad insulting.

 _“_ _why did you read all his posts about Steve?”_ Is Bruce’s reply, because he’s decided to ignore the point. “ _you just have to look at the two of them to know”_

 _“_ _well obviously not if my keen eyes couldn’t catch it”_ Tony really hopes they know he’s huffing at them.

Sam replies with ten _ha_ ’s in a row, which is both excessive and rude and Tony won’t stand for it.

 _“rude, birdbrain, but fine. whatever. what are we going to do about it????”_ He types instead of a full rebuttal. He’s still maybe a bit giddy from the discovery and the fact he’s been denied the chance to be the first to let other people know just means he has a lot of excess energy to try and channel.

 _“support them and whatever they choose to do?”_ Bruce replies. Tony loves him to death, but Bruce just didn’t really understand how TV Land _worked_.

 _“Tony I’ve been waiting for them to get together since last session”_ Sam says. Tony can picture the anguish on Sam’s face with a startling clarity. “ _I’m not sure we can do anything”_

 _“ahhh my friends”_ Tony types, a grin beginning to form before he can stop it. “ _that’s because you didn’t have an engineer on your side”_

 _“Oh, god”_ Sam replies, but Tony’s already formulating plans.

+++

At 10am on Friday a week into the mid-session break Bucky receives a text from Steve saying “ _death is here”_. This is followed almost immediately by one saying “ _im sick”_ and then “ _help”._

Despite the fact that Bucky is fully aware of the fact that Steve still having the ability to text means that he’s less sick than his dramatics would imply, there is still a part of Bucky’s brain that hears the words ‘Steve’ and ‘sick’ in the same sentence and immediately goes into panic mode. It was a habit for most of his formative years and was also, apparently, not something he’d lost over their years apart.

 _‘_ _On way’_ Bucky replies. He sculls the rest of his tea, throws on a clean enough outfit that he classifies as a functioning member of society, grabs his bag, and sprints to his car.

He drives to Steve’s house in only a mild panic. He’s very proud of himself for how calm he’s being, given the circumstances. He’s less proud when it takes him until he’s already in Steve’s house to realise that he hadn’t knocked at all on the way in and had left the front gate swinging open in the breeze. He turns, closes the gate properly, and then walks back into the house, this time shutting the door behind himself.

“Hello?” He calls out, walking down the hallway and into the living room as if he expects Steve to leap out from behind the couch. “Steve? Stevie? Are you dead?”

“Yes.” Comes a very small voice from the bedroom that branches off from the living room. Bucky lets out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding at the sound of Steve’s voice. “This is my ghost.”

Bucky pushes the bedroom door open and sees that Steve is curled up in a giant ball of blankets on what is, quite obviously, his mother’s Queen bed. All Bucky can see of him is two very sad looking blue eyes and a tuft of blonde hair.

“Well.” Bucky sighs and crosses his arms. “Aren’t you just the saddest little thing this side of the Murrumbidgee.”

“I want to die.” Steve groans. He sounds like he’s eaten a cactus. “Please kill me. Bring me peace.”

“And risk the wrath of your TV Land fanclub? Nah, mate, I like my face too much to risk it like that.” He sits on the edge of the bed. “What’s wrong?”

“ _Everything._ ” Steve says gravely, and then proceeds to cough for a solid 20 seconds.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Bucky deadpans. The fact that he has physical evidence of Steve being the normal kind of sick and not the life-threatening kind means he feels a lot better about falling into their usual patterns of conversation. “You seem like the pinnacle of health.”

“You can’t see, but I’m flipping you off right now.” Steve mumbles.

“Where’s your mum?” Bucky looks around, his slowly clearing panic now leaving enough room in his head for logical thoughts, the main one being why Steve was alone.

“Canberra.” Steve says miserably. “Hospital nurses’ convention or something. She’s gone until Sunday.”

“You poor little dumpling.” Bucky pats Steve’s hair and Steve wiggles his head slightly.

“Nooooo.” Steve whines, but beyond the wiggling makes no move to avoid the contact. “I’ll make you sick too.”

“Well you should’ve thought of that before you texted me all pathetic-like at 10am on a bloody Friday, Stevie.”

“Buck-”

“Steve, c’mon.” Bucky rolls his eyes. “I’ve done this before. It’s no big deal.”

There’s a moment where they have the world’s most pathetic glare off. Bucky wins.

“I haven’t tried eating since this morning.” Steve admits in a grumble.

“Let’s try some plain toast and see how that goes, then.” Bucky smiles, ruffles Steve’s hair as gently as possible, and saunters off to the kitchen.

+++

Steve ends up making it half way through one slice when he has to break into a dead sprint for the bathroom and pukes into the toilet for a solid 30 seconds.

“Okay.” Bucky says from the doorway when Steve’s stopped dry-heaving long enough that it’s probably safe to assume he’s not going to puke again. “Food’s a no-go. Got it.”

Steve flips him off weakly. It’s the effort that counts.

+++

Bucky ends up making a nest in front of the gas heater out of couch cushions and a random frog pillow pet he found at the end of Steve’s mum’s bed. Steve flops into the nest, wrapped in a dressing gown after his post-vomit shower, and when he settles into a comfortable position Bucky throws a blanket over him, sits a glass of water with an over-long bendy straw in it next to Steve’s head, and then sits on the couch with his laptop and watches a _Poirot_ marathon on low volume on the TV.

“Where’d you get the laptop?” Steve asks, muffled from where he’s crammed his face into the pillow pet.

“It was in my back pack.” Bucky shrugs. “You’re lucky, otherwise I’d be bored stiff with your company.” There’s a moment of silence. “Why? Did you think I left to get it? While you were like this?”

Steve doesn’t reply. Bucky clears his throat awkwardly.

“I wouldn’t leave you like this, Steve.” Bucky feels awkward saying it, too raw in a way he can’t place, but it needs to be said. “Not ever.”

“...Thanks Buck.” Steve’s voice is very, very quiet.

“Not a problem, pal.” Bucky rubs the back of his head awkwardly. “Now, either watch David Suchet solves crimes or go to sleep.”

+++

Steve ends up sleeping for 5 hours while Bucky fucks around on the internet and eats Steve’s food. The first thing Bucky hears him say in 5 solid hours is “Why does Hastings look funny?”

Bucky looks at the TV. The _Poirot_ marathon had ended about two hours ago and had been replaced by _Murdoch Mysteries_ , which was basically a one show promotion in moving to Canada to become an Extra.

“Remastering changes all sort of things nowadays, Stevie.” Bucky sets his laptop aside and leans forward so he can get a better look at Steve. “How you feeling?”

“Better.” Steve rubs his eyes and rolls over in his giant cocoon. His cheeks are painfully pink from the warmth, but he makes no move to remove any of his layers. “Still shitty. How long have I been out?”

“Bout 5 hours.” Bucky shrugs. Steve blinks slowly. “I ate most of the crossiants, by the way.”

“You stayed the whole time?” Steve asks, something very tender in his voice. Bucky’s reminded of when they were kids and he’d sit by Steve’s bedside, pressing cold cloths to his face and telling him dumb stories about whatever came to mind.

“We’ve been over this.” Bucky pokes at where he assumes Steve’s foot is with his toe. He makes contact with something, whether or not it’s a foot remains up for debate. “Yes, Steve, I stayed.”

“You’re too nice to me.” Steve grumbles, clumsily twisting his torso around so he can grab his glass of water and set it down on the other side now that he’d rolled over.

“It’s called friendship, Stevie. I hear I’m very good at it.”

“Bullshit.” Steve yawns as he resettles. “Sam would beg to differ.”

“Sam thinks 4am jogs are a good idea.” Bucky waves his hand dismissively. Steve’s grinning, ever so slightly. “He deserves bad friendship.’

“Tony?”

“I’ll stop ragging on him when he buys my silence.”

“You’d take all his money in a week.” Steve sniggers. “Loki?”

“Hey, that’s not fair, Loki always starts shit!” Bucky points a finger at Steve. “Don’t tell me you woke up just to tell me all our friends hate me. I’ll never forgive you.”

Steve sticks his tongue out. Bucky blows a raspberry back, which makes Steve snigger. There’s a beat of silence right after, though, where Steve’s face shifts just enough that it gives Bucky pause.

“Foggy?” Steve asks, more serious than before. Bucky’s blinks.

“What about him?”

“Sam said.” Steve starts, which is a very good indicator that Bucky isn’t going to like the rest of the sentence. “He said he saw and you and Foggy having a _thing_ after you finished _The Crucible_. Said that was why you were in a bad mood that day.”

“That’s a lot of hearsay.” Bucky hedges. He tries not to think about why Steve, out of all the things to remember that day by, defines it by the fact Bucky was in a shitty mood.

“I wanna _know_.” Steve presses. “I’m your best friend. Are you fighting with Foggy?”

“Why does it matter, Steve?” Bucky has no idea where this conversation came from. “Foggy and I are friends. Neither of us have done anything to change that.”

“Buck-”

“Leave it, Steve.” Bucky is so far from being in the mood to discuss the whole situation, especially with Steve, and especially while he was sick. “Ask me when you’re better, okay?”

“Okay.” Steve nods solemnly before attempting to sit up. Bucky slides off the couch and helps him remove enough of the blanket pile to make that possible. “Okay, I feel better.”

“Nice try. Better enough to try food again?” Bucky sits back on his haunches, trying to disperse some of the blistering heat blasting onto his back from the heater.

“Tea first.” Steve nods. “Tea makes everything better.”

+++

Steve ends up having to run to the bathroom and puke again about 5 minutes after he’s finished the cup. Bucky sighs, chucks it in the dishwasher, and goes to sit next to the bathroom door while Steve showers again.

+++

Bucky likes to talk to Steve through the bathroom door while he has post-puke showers. It’s another remnant from when they were kids, since the only way Bucky really new how to comfort people at the time was to talk to them until they either laughed or told him to shut up.

(If he was being honest with himself, that was still his main form of coping with any kind of emotionally stressful situation. However, sometimes Bucky was very bad at being honest with himself.)

“Do you know Tony’s friend Bruce? The med student?” Bucky asks. He doesn’t wait for a response. One isn’t coming. “I saw him down town the other day, in Coles. He was buying the largest amount of chai I have ever seen in my life.”

“Good for him.” Steve says weakly. “Good for blood pressure.”

“That seems like something he’d have to consider, being friends with Tony and all.”

“Tony’s not all bad.” Steve defends, but there’s no heart in it. Bucky’s not sure if that’s because he’s only saying it out of friendly obligation or if it’s just because he’s sick.

“Softie.” Bucky says in fake accusation. Steve let’s out a weak laugh.

There’s a silence then that rubs Bucky the wrong way. The idea that Steve thinks Bucky’s keeping bad things from him because he doesn’t think Steve’s a good enough friend makes him feels itchy under the skin. He takes a deep breath.

“Foggy and I had. A fight.” Bucky says, very quickly, when he’s pretty sure that Steve has his head directly under the shower head and can’t hear anything outside of his steam bubble.

“What?” Steve says, too shocked to be confusion, and Bucky silently curses.

“Just a small thing.” Bucky rubs the back of his neck. “He’s… He’s in love with his best friend. One of his best friends. And he called me an idiot for trying to give him advice because I haven’t dated in so long.”

He had also called him a hypocrite for making it out like Foggy needed to be braver, when Bucky himself was too chicken shit to admit he was… that he has a _thing_ for Steve. But Steve does not need to know this.

(Bucky is very aware that thinking that sort of proves Foggy’s point.)

“Oh.” Steve says, quieter, and immediately proceeds to puke in the shower. “Unrelated, but I kind of want to die right now.”

“Understandable.” Bucky sighs. “I’ll throw some new pj’s in the dryer.”

“Thank you.” Steve calls miserably. Bucky takes a second to press the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard, before he goes to dig through Steve’s clothes.

+++

“Do I need to beat him up for you?” Steve asks, groggy, when Bucky’s shoved him into new pj’s and tucked him back into his mum’s bed so he can sweat the rest of his sickness out.

“What?” Bucky asks, arranging a fresh glass of water on the bed side table.

“Foggy.” Steve says, as if it should be obvious. “I can beat him up. I can.”

“You _really_ can’t.” Bucky laughs.

“I can.” Steve pouts. “He’s not being fair.”

“Well, neither was I.” Bucky shrugs. It feels too strange to talk about this with Steve. “Leave him be, Stevie, I’m fine with it.”

Steve makes a vague grumbling noise and rolls over so he can burrito himself in the blankets, just like how Bucky’d found him in the morning. Bucky sighs.

“You’re going to fight him in your head, aren’t you?”

“Shuddup.”

+++

Steve ends up sleeping for 13 hours and apologises profusely when he wakes up because he ‘made Bucky sleep on the couch’.

+++

Three days later, when Bucky wakes up with the sort of headache that could down an elephant and the irrepressible feeling that his stomach was trying to claw it’s way out of his throat, he gets his revenge by making Steve take care of him and getting puke on his shoes.

“Truly, I live for our friendship.” Steve grumbles while he throws his shoes in the washing machine. If Bucky could laugh without puking, he would have cackled.

+++

The first week after mid-session break revolves entirely around rehearsing and beginning to film episodes of Playschool, continued rehearsing for their final performances, getting assigned their design roles for final performances, and Steve becoming costume lackey for a self-devised piece based on clowns.

“Fuck my whole existence.” Steve said at 2am the Saturday after it was all done. “If I ever have to touch grease paint again I’m going to set myself on fire.”

“And you say I’m dramatic.” Bucky laughs, even while he sits there trying to work out how to fold a pretty enough paper hat to use for Playschool craft time.

+++

“I want to die.” Bucky says, flopping himself down on Steve’s couch, a script clutched in his hand.

“Can dying wait until my self-reflection is done?” Steve doesn’t look up from where he’s tapping at his laptop keys, which removes some of the drama from Bucky’s entrance.

“You’d choose _assessments_ over _me?_ ”

“It’s due in 3 hours.”

“How many words?” Bucky raises his head slightly off the couch in order to look at Steve properly.

“2500.” Steve says, the number burned into his brain after having checked the assessment guidelines every 5 minutes for the past two hours.

“Pffft.” Bucky’s head flops back onto the couch. “You could knock that out in an hour, you just don’t _wanna_.”

“Well, would you?”

“I have more pressing issues than mere self-reflection.” Bucky says, dramatically, into the cushions. Bucky says most things dramatically, especially when he has a script in his hand, and if Steve ever said that out loud he’d get decked. “It is of _intense personal urgency._ ”

Steve sighs, rubs his eyes, and sets his laptop down on the floor so that Bucky can’t accuse him of being distracted. “What’s happening in actor-land, Buck?”

“ _First Cut._ ” Bucky hisses, flapping the script in Steve’s direction. Steve takes it so he can see what all the fuss is about. The script’s only about 16 pages long, decent chunks of which are scribbled out, but if Steve’s learnt anything from his acting elective it’s that page numbers can be deceptive.

The title page says _“Features of Blown Youth by Raimondo Cortese”_ in unassuming font and it’s covered in pencil scribbles and directors’ notes (another thing he had learnt from his elective is that actors, as a whole, have terrible handwriting. He has yet to work out how they can decipher their own writing well enough to get anything done. Truly, they are creatures of mystery). On the whole, he can’t see what it’s really done to get Bucky so worked up.

“Oh yeah, _Final Cut_.” Steve says mildly, flipping through the script to see all the lines Bucky’s highlighted in neon yellow. He’s on stage a decent amount, but at a glance he also speaks for the longest whenever he is on stage, so that’s probably why he’s lying face down on the couch even though he’s not performing it for another 3 weeks. “I’m doing lighting for that one about Charlie Brown.”

“ _Dog Sees God._ ” Bucky supplies automatically, because he can’t help himself. “It’s only called _Final Cut_ in Design, which is ridiculous, they should have the same fuckin’ name.” He shifts his head around until he can breathe again, momentarily distracted from his initial plight. “I’m doing sound for _Blackrock_.” He adds, deeply disgusted.

“Ew.” Says Steve, who had been forced to study _Property of the Clan_ ( _Blackrock_ ’s earlier incarnation, which was equally as depressing even if the story was slightly different) in high school, and had held an unfathomable hatred for both plays ever since. “Who’s in that one?”

“ _Does it matter?_ ” Bucky groans into the cushion. There’s a pause. “Foggy’s playing Jared. Natasha’s playing Rachel. Darcy’s playing Cherie and she’s trying not to let everyone see how shit scared she is of doing that graveyard monologue.”

“They’re doing _Blackrock_ with only 3 people?” Steve asks, eyebrows furrowing. “What about Ricko?”

Bucky just throws his hands in the air.

“ _Actors._ ” Steve mutters, looking back down at Bucky’s script. “So, what’s happening in your play that’s so bad you had to distract me from my education?”

Bucky takes a second to let out a pained mini-shriek into the couch cushions, which was probably the most eloquent way he’d expressed his inner monologue in weeks.

Bucky finally pushes himself up and into a slumped sitting position, face twisted up in distaste, much like a muppet.

“This fucking play.” Bucky snarls, which Steve thinks probably counts as a disproportionate reaction, but, hey, _actors_.

“Start at the beginning.” Steve prompts, which mostly causes Bucky’s muppet face to compress further.

“So, I’m playing this. Asshole.” He grabs the script off of Steve, as if without it in his hand he can’t get properly angry about it. “ _Oron_. Piece of shit. Fuckin neurotic asshole who’s in love with one girl – Harriet, who’s the only well-adjusted character in this whole shit storm – but he’s a total _dick_ about it, always beggin’ her for money even though he’s the one asking her out, and he’s sort of dating and macking on with this other girl as if that’s not _fucked_. And he’s constantly hanging with this asshole – Guido, who is such a racial stereotype, Christ – but then he befriends Rot the pseudo-skinhead even though Oron’s fuckin _Jewish-_ ”

Steve lets the ranting wash over him, mostly, because a Bucky incensed is a Bucky who won’t listen to anything you have to contribute to the conversation, so it’s best to let him tire himself out. At least he wasn’t, once again, ranting about how he couldn’t find purple pants to wear for his Playschool episode.

“And he’s probably, shit, on pingas or something stupid, cause near the end when Harriet leaves he’s all over the fucking place, and, fuck, we don’t even _start_ until scene 16, because we have to do _‘20 minute compressed versions’_ even though we’ve had to cut out the _antagonist_ so all of us are just. Doing shit. With no catalyst. Until scene fucking 30, with about a billion scenes cut out in between because we _have. No. Villain!_ And on top of all of that, we’ve got, fuckin, 3 weeks, no set design, and the whole thing is _fucked_!” Bucky has to take a second to cover his face with his hands and breathe deeply. “I am deeply aggravated.” He says finally, perfectly flat.

Steve nods, considerate, and leans forward to put a comforting hand on Bucky’s shoulder.

“Buck?” Steve says. Bucky drops his hands and looks at Steve. “No one on this earth has said ‘macking on’ since the 90’s.”

“Oh _fuck you_ Rogers!” Bucky shoves Steve, who has started laughing, as hard as he can in the shoulder. Steve flops back in his chair, beaming. “Loads of people say it! I saw it on _Scrubs_.”

“Ah yes, the encyclopaedia of all current slang.”

“If you’re not gunna vent with me then help me learn this fuckin thing.” Bucky grumbles, flipping pages until he hits his first entrance. “Might as well embrace my inner neurotic douchebag while I have the time.”

“Buck.” Steve picks up his laptop, still open on his self-reflection, and turns it around so Bucky can see that he has written approximately 80 words out of the required 2500. Bucky groans and drops his head back against the sofa.

“Fine. Whatever. Get a good grade, see if I care.” He settles further into the couch. “I’ll just run lines in my head like an _amateur_.”

“If the shoe fits.” Steve says, grinning like a shit, and he doesn’t even put up a fight when Bucky pummels him with a pillow for the comment, since he does sort of deserve it.

+++

“Wait.” Bucky says, four hours later, well after Steve managed to scrape his word count together and started helping Bucky run lines (Which, okay, Bucky was right, everyone in the play was fucked up). “You’re in the Friday class, right?”

“Uh, yeah?” Steve raises an eyebrow, holding his thumb over the line they were up to. “Why?”

“That means _you’re_ in a First Cut play too, dingbat.” Bucky pokes Steve in the shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me? Letting me sit here talk my face off about fuckin Oron when I could have been helping you run lines. C’mon, grab your script, it’s your turn.”

“We really don’t need to do that.” Steve shifts in his seat, looking down at Bucky’s script. “It’s really not that much, we can focus on you.”

“Well now I know you’re hiding something.” Bucky smiles. “Stevie, I’m not gunna make fun of you, it’s your assessment as well, so I’ll help.”

“I just.” Steve shrugs. “I’m not an actor, Buck, this isn’t as big for me.”

“I’ll still help, jeeze.” Bucky kicks Steve’s shin playfully. “C’mon, which one are you in? C’mooooon.”

“ _Osama the Hero._ ” Steve snaps. “I’m playing the old dude whose garage gets destroyed and he gets all sanctimonious even though he’s fucking around with a sixteen year old.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“Well shit.” Bucky sighs. “Nicholas does like making you suffer, doesn’t he?”

“Tell me about it.”

+++

Doreen has spent quite a lot of time this year trying to understand her friends.

She has yet to fully succeed in this mission.

“You hang out with them a lot.” She says to Natasha during lunch one day. She had not cornered Natasha, as it was physically impossible to corner Natasha, but she had waited for Natasha to be alone from three tables away before she went up to her to talk. “Can you give me some hints? Because everyone has been acting really weird lately.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow at her.

“Well, weirder than normal.” Doreen shrugs.

“I try to keep my nose out of other people’s business.” Natasha says haughtily.

“Liar.” Doreen smiles. Natasha blinks at her. “C’mon, Nat, if there’s anyone on this campus who knows what’s going on in everyone else’s lives, it’s you.”

Natasha blinks at her again. “Did you just call me Nat?”

“Am I not allowed to?” Doreen really hopes she is allowed to. Natasha wears leather jackets all the time and seems to own nothing but heeled combat boots. If she was really mad about the nickname she could probably beat Doreen in a fight. Probably.

“No, no.” Natasha sounds softer now, surprised, and Doreen isn’t really sure where this is coming from. “It’s fine. I like it.” She chews the inside of her cheek for a moment. “I think everyone’s too scared to give me a nickname.”

Doreen realises that she’s never, in all the time they’ve known each other, actually sat down and tried to learn more about Natasha. Nat. She had figured there wasn’t much to find out beyond the fact she was kind of scary.

“Well, that’s dumb.” Doreen decides, in the moment, that working out the rest of her friends and their convoluted issues was a job for another day.

“Well, yeah.” Nat smiles at her, just a quirk in the corner of her mouth. “It really sort of is.”

+++

One Saturday, while Steve’s mum has a shift and Bucky’s gone off to Wodonga to visit his family, Steve gets a lift out to campus for rehearsal and ends up stuck there with no way to get home.

He walks from Student Space to Cottages, which is a whole little village of accommodation made up of tiny brick houses and interconnecting paths, and tries to see which of the friends he knows lives in the area is home. He remembers vaguely that Tony’s friend Bruce lived in Cottages. He hoped they’d spent enough lunch times together that Steve could cobble together a convincing enough argument to get a lift home.

 _“what cottage does Bruce live in?”_ He texts to Tony, who replies with _“316”_ within seconds. He doesn’t ask why Steve’ asking. Tony confuses Steve.

He goes to 316 and knocks on the door and is beyond surprised when he recognises the face that answers.

“Oh.” He smiles, trying to channel any of the charm Bucky seemed to have in spades. “You’re a friend of Thor’s, right?”

+++

“Hey” Steve starts the second Thor picks up his phone, already keen to get away from Thor’s Flirty Friend, who he’s been stuck in a conversation with for the past 10 minutes. People flirting with him had confounded him for his entire life, and apparently he’d gotten no better at receiving that kind of attention since moving back to Wagga. “If you’re not busy, could you give me a lift? My mum has the car today.”

“Steve!” Thor’s booming voice is tinny in the speakers, but even a phone connection can’t distort the enthusiasm in his voice. “I am currently assisting in a film project in the Hamptons barbeque area, so I can’t help you until after. I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s cool.” Steve takes another step away from the roommate (Fandral? He’s not sure if that’s his real name or if that was his LARP name and Thor hadn’t bothered to specify) who just keeps beaming like he’s going to lunge for Steve’s throat. “I’m actually at cottages. I’ll walk over and chill out until you’re done.”

“Excellent!” Steve can tell that Thor is beaming. “I shall see you soon, good friend!”

“Yeah, you too mate.” Steve hangs up and tries to dredge up whatever acting skills he’s managed to acquire in order to beat a hasty retreat. “Well, uh, I’ve gotta head. So. Thanks for keeping me company.”

“Pleasure.” Fandral legitimately winks. Steve feels his cheeks turn distinctly pink.

“Um, yes. Thanks.” ‘ _You need to commit to your actions_.’ a voice in Steve’s head that sounds suspiciously like Bucky says as Steve shakes Fandral’s hand and all but runs out the door. ‘ _Play them stronger. Engage your audience, Rogers’_

Steve ends up texting _“god help me I’ve started thinking like them”_ to Peggy before he’s even halfway to Hamptons.

+++

“What’s happening?” Steve asks Foggy, who’s sitting atop the built-in barbeque like it was made to be reclined on.

“Scott and Wanda’s TV assessment.” Foggy points over at Scott Lang, a TV production student that Steve’s met all of once before, who’s leaning on a pair of crutches behind a camera and scrutinising the landscape. “We’re doing an Amazing Race type deal, except about Wagga stuff.”

“So, boring?” Steve leans on the barbeque beside where Foggy’s sitting. At the picnic table next to them Tony and Bruce are nattering away with Thor, who mostly just looks pleased to be involved.

(Steve has a moment where he realises that Tony had known Bruce wasn’t home when he texted him his address. He tries to repress the irritated sigh he feels. He mostly succeeds.)

“Basically.” Foggy sighs. “This bit should be fun though, we’re having an eating contest with Chiko rolls.”

“Ugh.” Steve wrinkles his nose. “Sounds appealing.”

“Hey, I’m the host, I don’t have to eat them.” Foggy shrugs. “These guys, however, have to eat a _lot_.”

“Ding ding!” Wanda chirps as she appears from around the corner of a building, a pyramid of Chiko rolls on a plate in her hands. “Ready!”

“Stunner.” Foggy says, jumping down from the barbeque. “Right, ladies and gents, let’s shove some Chiko rolls in our faces!”

“Oh.” Bruce blinks, drawn out of his conversation about god-knows-what with Tony. “We have to eat them?” He looks back at Tony. “You didn’t say we had to eat them.”

“It’s an eating contest.” Tony raises an eyebrow.

“You didn’t _say_ that.” Bruce says firmly.

“Is this an issue?” Scott asks, swivelling around to face them as quickly as he can with one foot in a cast and a tripod in the way of his crutches.

“I’m a vegetarian.” Bruce frowns, eyebrows drawing together. Tony’s eyebrows shoot up. “And while the amount of meat in them is questionable, I still can’t eat it.”

“I can fill in.” Steve offers, but Wanda’s already shaking her head.

“We have already filmed Bruce in other scenes.” She says, setting the plate on the table. She looks between them all, then gets a smug smile on her face. “So Tony will have to do the eating for you.”

“Say what?” Tony actually pulls his sunglasses down his nose so Wanda can see the full effect of the Look he gives her. Steve finds it kinda funny. “Are you telling me that because Bruce can’t eat fake chicken meat I now have to go up against you and Thor on my _own_?”

“They use sausage meat, actually.” Scott chimes in. “Now c’mon Tony, suck it up and cram them in your maw before my leg seizes up again.”

“That’s what she said.” Foggy whispers to Steve, who has to resist the urge to snort.

+++

Tony ends up eating six Chiko rolls in less time than it takes Wanda and Thor to eat three each, which is so unbelievable that it has to classify as a miracle.

“What can I say?” Tony tries to smile, but ends up grimacing and turning kind of green instead. “I’m a determined guy.”

“You should lie down for a while and try not to puke.” Bruce says. He’s rubbing Tony’s back as a sort of apology for making him do the contest alone. It’s probably a small consolation prize. “Doctor’s orders?”

“Well, at least all your scenes are done.” Scott says, vaguely comforting. Wanda’s talking too Foggy about the scenes they still have to film of him on his own, and now Scott’s been left with other humans. He’s obviously not having a good time of it. “You can puke in peace.”

“Stop talking about puke.” Tony actually takes his sunglasses off and rests his head on the table. Steve resists the urge to sigh and pulls a fresh water bottle out of his bag. He thunks it down as gently as he can next to Tony’s head. Tony opens one eye to look at it. “Aw, thanks Steve, that warms the cockles of my little black heart.”

“Wow, my real name.” Steve raises his eyebrows. “You must feel like real shit.”

“Language.” Tony mumbles. Bruce sniggers.

+++

 _“SO CODE RED BUT BUCKY SPENT MOST OF THE HOLIDAYS AT STEVE’S HOUSE”_ Tony sends to his Sam and Bruce group chat, which he had named _‘Engineers For Friendly Boning Practices’_ but which Bruce had changed to _‘Tony stop’_ because Bruce is boring. _“STEVE JUST TOLD ME AT FILMING WHILE I WAS TRYING NOT TO PUKE”_

 _“They always do this.”_ Sam replies. _“Literally all the time. All they do is spend time at each other’s houses_  
_Literally_  
_All the time”_

 _“i feel like that started as a statement of the obvious and ended with you realising how frustrating this behaviour is”_ Tony shoots back. Most of their conversations since forming the group had gone like this instead of involving any kind of planning with regard to getting Steve and Bucky together. Tony’s beginning to feel like maybe moving to Australia to dick around in an Acting degree had dulled his keen engineering senses.

 _“Shut up. I want them to date so bad.”_ Sam sends. Tony can almost see his frustrated face.

 _“Question:”_ Bruce sends. _“Do any of us know if Steve is straight or not?”_

“Um.” Tony says, out loud, alone in his apartment. Next to him, U the robot buzzes around in a circle and waits for a command. “Oops.”

+++

Natasha Romanoff has spent most of her very young life priding herself on the fact that she is, at any given moment, the most in control person in any room. She has carefully cultivated this image since high school and now that she was most of the way through her first year of university she was certain of the fact that she had it down to an art.

She can read off her daily accomplishments like a checklist of competency. Her hair is always perfect, her clothes are always co-ordinated, neutral while still being nice, she always has the smallest purse with the most useful things in it, keeps spare shoes in her car, finishes every assignment early and has grades in the top 5% of her year, she laughs at the right jokes, says the right things, is always in control of a room without being overbearing, and is just scary enough that no one thinks she’s a try hard. She is the Perfect Girl, the Organised Friend, everything that she could ever aspire to be.

What she tells no one, however, is that she constantly feels as if she is slowly suffocating under her own achievements.

 _‘I wonder’_ she ponders in her dorm, surrounded by plush pillows and motivational cat posters, wearing the Wonder Woman onesie she’s owned since year 9 and methodically making her way through a large plastic tub of apricot delight. _‘How many of my **friends** are waiting for me to slip up so they can ridicule me?’_

This is of course the exact moment that Steve Rogers, perfect human specimen and epitome of everything Natasha is not, walks into her room with the most pathetic of knocks as a warning.

“Hey Natasha, you said I could grab your notes off you for-” He freezes in the doorway, mouth half open.

He stares at her.

She stares at him.

The baby sloth video she’d been watching continues to blast its soothing, plinky-plonk background music through her tinny laptop speakers.

“Um.” Steve says, eloquent as ever, and in that one moment Natasha wants nothing more than to melt into the floor and _die_. “Am I interrupting any-”

“If you tell anyone about this I _will_ kill you.” She cuts in, trying to draw from her normal endless supply of inner calm despite the fact that Steve Rogers, the actual personification of male perfection, is currently staring at her in her weakest, fluffiest form.

“That seems like an overreaction.” Steve tries to smile and make light of the situation, as if he has not just discovered Natasha’s biggest social secret, but it falls flat. His hand is still on the doorknob.

“Get in here.” She sighs, resigned to her fate all at once. “Shut the door.”

 _‘Well.’_ She thinks, watching as Steve follows her commands, quick smart, and then proceeds to stand awkwardly in front of her now closed door. _‘Might as well try damage control.’_

Steve takes her silence to mean that she wants him to sit down, and after a moment of very obvious internal deliberation he settles next to her in the pillow mountain she’d assembled on her bed. She buries her face in her hands and takes a deep breath, holds it for a count of five, then lets it out slowly. It’s her anxieties version of a re-start button, and it’s the really the only thing she has control of in that moment.

When she looks up again Steve is trying very hard to look like he isn’t staring at every surprising aspect of her room, from the posters to the _Frankie_ magazines she leaves in a haphazard pile in the corner. She pauses the sloth video and closes her laptop, which is enough movement to snap his attention back to her.

“I’m not kidding.” She says, firm as she can. “You can’t tell anyone. I have a reputation to uphold and I’m not going to let you ruin that.”

“Your lack of faith wounds me.” He tries to joke but falls short, and she’s surprised by the amount of genuine hurt buried in his voice. She’d always known he was bad at hiding his emotions, but she’s still surprised any time something she does makes him sad. “What would I gain from telling people?”

“What did you think I did in my spare time?” She raises an eyebrow. His eyebrows furrow.

“Um, I don’t know. Sharpen the knives I assumed you had? Work out in a secret cave and fight crime? Eat kale?”

“Exactly.” She’s trying not to smile now. Of all the guys she’s pretended to find funny in order to keep them happy, Steve’s the only one she’s ever found genuinely amusing. “I put a lot of effort into making sure people think that. And I’m sorry, but in my experience anyone as perfect as you is only ever looking for another way to bring me down a peg.”

“I’m not perfect.” He shoots back, which misses the point of her little speech enough that she feels almost offended. “You can’t spend your whole life thinking everyone’s out to get you. That’s no way to live.”

“It’s a good way to survive.” She counters. “Forgive me for doing what I do Steve, but I just can’t trust a guy with that much muscle tone and no secrets.”

“You don’t know me.” He snaps, suddenly angry, and she feels her hands clench into fists.

“I know enough.”

“No, you don’t.” He pauses, breathes, and when he speaks again he’s much calmer. She doesn’t unclench her fists. “Not everyone is how they appear on the outside.”

“Says the man who couldn’t imagine me with a soft side.” She snaps. He looks surprised, then sheepish, like he’s actually upset that he made assumptions about her, as if that’s not what she _wanted_. “You want to have deep dark secrets, I get it, I really do, but I’m not here for pity. If you want to talk about looking beyond appearances, then talk to me when I have to stop building my friendships on negotiations. I have to keep everyone happy at all times, or I’m not worth it. Talk to me when you have to keep secrets just to survive.”

They’re both quiet after her outburst. Steve blinks, sheepish, and she rubs her face with her hands to try and calm down. Breathe in for 7, hold for 5, out for 7.

“I’m bi.” He says. She whips around to look at him. He looks shocked by his own admission. “Only my mum knows. But, I’m.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I’m bi.”

“Oh, Steve.” She breathes. In for 7. Hold for 5. “I’m sorry, I didn’t-”

“I get it.” He shrugs, but he’s not meeting her eyes. “You’re right. Everyone looks at me, and all they see is...” He gestures at his body. “They don’t see the sick kid I was, or the fact I need glasses, or any of that. They just see what they want to see and...” He closes his eyes for a beat and knots his fingers together, anxious. “They don’t want the rest.” He looks at her then, sadder than she’s ever seen him, and she feels something in her chest twinge. “I can’t make you risk your neck when I’m not even willing to put myself on the line. We both have our reasons. So, no, I’m not going to tell people what you do to keep sane. I’m not that kind of friend.”

“We’re friends?” She asks, surprised despite herself. She’s always held Steve at arm’s length, scared that because she couldn’t tell what he wanted from her that it meant he could see through her like glass. “I’m a pretty bad one, if we are.”

“We do what we do to survive.” He extends an arm to her, and after a beat she ducks under it to rest her head on his shoulder, his arm curled around her. “We just forgot that other people do that too. Doesn’t make us bad friends.”

 _‘I’m the only bad friend_ ’ she thinks in the silence that follows. She’d never considered that Steve, the earnest and shining example of what a man should be, would be just as scared of what people think as she was.

“Do you want to watch sloth videos with me?” She says instead, purely to break the silence. Steve laughs.

“I would love to, Nat.”

+++

It takes a good 20 minutes of sloth videos (“I like the ones in onesies.” Steve says seriously. “They look comfy.”) for Natasha to work up enough courage to ask the one question that’s really been burning in her since Steve made his big admission.

“So.” She starts, faking nonchalance by checking her nails while she talks. “Only your mum and I know?”

“Yes.” Steve reaches over and clicks on a new video. This one is about kittens and puppies meeting for the first time.

“Only us?” She presses. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Steve’s shoulders tighten slightly.

“One of my friends in Sydney worked it out.” He says tensely. “That’s it.”

“Does that mean James-”

“No.” Steve says, firm. “He doesn’t. He can’t.”

“Why not?” She asks, looking at Steve at last. He’s looking at the wall, jaw clenched. He doesn’t say anything for a very long time. The reason hits her all at once. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” He smiles, bitter. “ _Oh._ ”

“You should tell him.”

“I can’t.” Steve shakes his head. “You know I, I can’t, I can’t do that. God, we’re best friends.”

“So?” She shrugs.

“So?!” Steve looks at her, almost comically scandalised. “I can’t ruin it. I can’t ruin what we have.”

“You sound like a bad teen romcom.” She accuses.

“You sound like Sam.” He snaps back. “Look, can you just. Drop it? Please.”

“Fine, fine.” She turns the volume up on her laptop and clicks on a new cat video. “Whatever you say, boss.”

Steve grumbles something she doesn’t hear, but she doesn’t call him out. The last hour has been strange for the both of them. She’s willing to cut him some slack.

+++

Doreen gets a text from Nat one day that just says _“Our other friends are idiots”_

 _“Well, duh.”_ As Doreen replies she is watching Bucky try to teach Foggy how to juggle with highlighters while Matt, Foggy’s very cute blind friend who’d tagged along to try and catch up on some Law work, randomly threw objects in the air for them to try and catch. _“That’s why we love them”_

+++

It’s a good four days after her conversation with Steve before Natasha can get James alone.

He’s being strangely elusive and won’t stop avoiding her, which is an especially outrageous feat considering they’d filmed their Playschool episode earlier in the week and had done at least 4 segments together. She really only manages to get him alone at all because she skips her normal Friday study hour so she can corner him in Eat @ 20 during his post Design lunch.

“G’day stranger.” She flops in the chair across from him. He jumps slightly, which brings her a tiny twinge of joy. He’s normally the only person she can’t sneak up on. “How’s the amazing world of James been going lately?”

“Fine.” He answers, eyes narrowing. “Why?”

“I haven’t seen you in nearly a week. Do I need a reason?”

“You always have a reason.” He shoots back. “I don’t think I can remember a conversation we’ve had where you didn’t push some kind of agenda.”

“Rude.” She sips her coffee. It tastes disgusting, but the effect works. “And untrue.”

“My point stands.” James huffs. He looks grumpily at his chips. “What do you want?”

“Honestly, nothing.” She shrugs. “You need to stop being paranoid.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, just sighs and shoves a chip in his mouth. They’re both silent for a beat.

“I fucking hate the chips here.” He says finally.

“I never realised you were so passionate about it.” She raises an eyebrow. He’s frazzled, worn at the edges like his whole being is trying to come loose. She wonders, suddenly, if she should avoid pulling on this particular thread. “How have those chunks of potato offended you today?”

“They’re soggy.” James grumbles, with such surprising venom that it almost makes up for being a truly anti-climatic statement. “And gross.”

“You’re soggy and gross.” She kicks him under the table. “Cheer up, Barnes. What would Rogers say if he saw you chucking a snit-fit like this?”

“He’d at least _agree_ with me.” James rubs his eyes. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m having a pretty shitty week.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” She deadpans. He snorts. “What’s up? Playschool went great. Is _First Cut_ still kicking your ass?”

“No, it’s just...” He trails off and, despite his extreme hatred for them not seconds before, eats another chip. “Everything, you know?”

“Yes.” She slumps in her chair slightly. “Although I feel like if you want this conversation to go anywhere you’re going to have to get more specific.”

“Pfft.” James makes a valiant attempt at a smile, but it falls short. He eats some more chips. She drinks more of her coffee. She’s waited this long for him to try and get his shit together, she can give him another 10 minutes.

“It’s not like the stories.” He says suddenly, laying his hand on the top of the table and pressing his fingers into the surface until the pads turn white from the pressure. “All those goddamn YA novels where you just _work out_ one day that you love someone you’ve known for years. How can you know? How can you possibly fuckin know that it’s love and not…” He trails off, releasing his death grip on the table and waving his hand vaguely. “You spend all your life being told you can just work out what love is, and no one ever actually tells you how to spot it.”

“That’s what’s got you riled up?” She asks.

“I’ve just. Been thinking about it lately.” He shrugs. “And on top of all the other shit I’m dealing with it’s just...” He sighs. “It makes everything more difficult than it needs to be, and I’m not really sure how to fix it.”

“Talking to him about it might be a start.” Natasha offers. James blinks. He doesn’t look outwardly shocked, he’s very good at hiding all of that sort of stuff. Natasha’s just better at spotting it than most people.

“How do you know it’s a _him_?” James waggles his eyebrows lewdly in an attempt to alleviate the pressing gloom. Natasha just smirks and steals one of his chips. They are not, actually, all that terrible.

“You’ve only known me 6 months.” She points out. He deflates the tiniest bit. “And if you wanted to date me you would have asked me when we made-out at Traffic Light Night.”

“If only everything were as easy as Traffic Light Night.” He smiles, fake wistful.

“The only thing easy that night was you.”

“Rude and incorrect.” He imitates her tone perfectly.

“Talk to him.” She repeats, stealing another chip.

“I’ll think about it, Nat.” He sighs in defeat. “Okay? I’ll think about it.”

+++

‘Thinking about it’ apparently translates into ‘Getting absolutely trashed on Dum Dum’s celebratory bourbon stash even though we don’t know what we’re celebrating and sending Steve a drunk text saying _“TALKG T YOU MAKSS ME HAPPPPPY”_ at 10:30pm on a Tuesday night, then regretting every one of these decisions for the next three days’

Bucky is not very good at talking about his feelings.

+++

 _“_ _James,”_ Natasha types, staring in abstract horror at the video on her screen. “ _did you just send me a Celine Dion playlist_  
_Did you just_  
_James, please tell me you’re not listening to Celine fucking Dion while thinking about Steve”_

 _“I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS”_ He types back.

 _“_ _James”_ She replies, too goddamn stunned by the ridiculousness of the situation to come up with a better reply.

_“I'm judging myself for this just as much as you are”_

_“_ _Unfuckinglikely, but at least you’re self-aware :p”_

 _“I tried talking to him.”_ James says after a good 3 minutes of silence.

_“And?”_

_“I drunk texted him_  
_that failed_  
_tried to talk in real life and chickened out_  
_how am I meant to do this?_  
_how the fuck am I meant to do this?”_

Natasha doesn’t actually have an answer to that.

+++

For their final performances they set up the Movement studio so that an audience can sit up one end, with chairs pressed against the walls so all the actors can sit at the sides and run on to perform their scenes and then sit back down when they’re done. It means everyone’s sitting there in costume, shuffling their feet awkwardly as the audience files in. Bucky lucked out, his group’s just in casual gear. He looks across at the group of girl performing _“Five Women Wearing the Same Dress”_ and marvels at the truly awful bridesmaid dresses they now have to wear for the next two hours.

When the group performing _“Dog Sees God”_ gets up (and, really, Bucky had never thought he’d see a day where Peter Quill would wear lemon butter yellow and pretend to be Charlie Brown, but here they are) Bucky looks up to the bio box built into the back of the room before the lights can blind him and he sees a flash of blond hair behind the glass.

He smiles.

(When, halfway through the play, Tony and Peter have to kiss and stay still until the lights fade, Bucky is pretty sure he can see Steve through the glass, dramatically mouthing the countdown as slowly as possible. There is a reason Steve is his favourite.)

+++

Bucky’s group is the second last play. Steve manages to sneak out of the bio box and into the audience in between two groups and curls up at the back as small as he can. He waits through the two plays in between, including a lovely one where Loki accidentally gets a girl pregnant and then joins the army. Australian plays. Nothing quite like it.

The lights go down again. Bucky isn’t in the first scene they do but Steve watches him anyway, sees the way he shifts his shoulders and taps his fingers, getting into character before his entrance. Steve’d seen him do this before, had been forced to watch it every time he helped Bucky run lines, but it never stopped being infinitely fascinating. He found it so strange that Bucky could shed all the charm and his smooth drawling voice and suddenly be twitchy, anxious, flighty and sharp. It boggled Steve’s mind.

“Then stay in ‘er fuckin’ room. This is outta bounds.” Sam yells. Steve realises that he’d been so caught up in looking at Bucky that he hadn’t realised the second scene had started. He feels himself blush.

“What have I done to you, mate?” Scott Summers challenges. He’s wearing a lot of khaki.

“Trespassed.” Bucky chimes in. The audience laughs and for a second Steve can see Bucky’s eyes shine, the way they always do when he gets people to laugh.

Steve smiles.

+++

“How did it go?” Bucky comes barrelling out of the second movement studio and into Steve, who’d waited very patiently in the foyer for Bucky to… do whatever he did after he performed. Steve’s not actually sure what weird actor traditions Bucky has. “Was it good? Did you like it?”

“It was awesome, Buck.” Steve laughs and hugs him. Bucky’s full of so much energy that he can’t stop bopping. “You were awesome.”

“You think so?” Bucky pulls back and futzes with his jacket. “It felt good. I’m glad you thought it was good.”

“Excuuuuse me!” Tony appears just as Bucky’s started smoothing his hair down. It’s a testament to how hyped Bucky is that Tony’s arrival manages to surprise him. “I’d hate to burst your bubble, friends, but I need to ask my lighting man if he knows how long ten seconds is or if he never quite covered that one as a child.”

“I was told to count to ten.” Steve shrugs. He’d made a show of counting slowly to the sound girl, but he’d faded the lights at a perfectly reasonable speed. He’s a professional. “Not my fault you and Peter got impatient.”

“Do you know what it’s like to kiss someone with that much artful scruff?” Tony squawks, which is extra ridiculous as he himself had recently started attempting to achieve the artful scruff Look. “Your timing has ruined my skin. It’s all chaffed now.”

“Tony.” Bruce Banner appears at Tony’s shoulder. “Don’t you have people to greet?” He says the last part with great meaning and a significant look at Steve and Bucky. Steve raises an eyebrow.

“Oh, yes. Well.” Tony opens his mouth to say something else, but Sam bangs through the doors and zeroes in on Steve.

“Rogers!” Sam runs over to them and slings his arms over both his and Bucky’s shoulders. When Steve looks back, Tony and Bruce are gone. “Man, tell me, how beautiful was I? How much did you fall in love with me?”

“I’d die for you. Oh baby, oh baby.” Steve says, perfectly flat. Bucky cackles.

“Now you’re getting it Rogers.” Sam beams and squeezes the two of them tighter.

+++

“Hey.” Nat walks up to Doreen in Eat @ 20 and sits down next to her. She seems, inexplicably, to be nervous.

“Hey.” Doreen toasts her with her hot chocolate. “What’s up?”

“I’m doing something in town in a couple of days.” Natasha’s being cryptic on purpose. Doreen’s used to it by now, but it doesn’t stop it being kinda weird. “I want someone to come with me. You keen?”

“Always.” Doreen looks her up and down. “Am I allowed to know what you’re doing before we do it?”

Natasha smirks. “I defied someone’s expectations recently. I’m trying to continue the trend.”

+++

The next night is Steve’s performance. _“Osama the Hero”_ is actually before _“Blackrock”_ , which means Bucky is _meant_ to be sitting in the second movement studio, staying perfectly quiet and checking his script. What ends up happening is Bucky sneaks into the bio box and watches the play from behind the lighting operator.

Steve does alright, all things considered. He was the first to admit that he wasn’t a natural born performer, but Bucky could see a lot of potential. Steve was definitely less stiff than he had been when they first ran lines, although every time he has to interact with Wanda he immediately loses any fluidity he ever had. Bucky feels sort of bad.

(He feels less bad as the scene progresses, as Steve has to sit there with a hammer and slam it against the floor and scream in some poor kids face. The audience is just as silent as Bucky is. He can see Steve’s hands shaking.

He’s glad _Blackrock_ isn’t that hard to tech for. His hands are shaking as well.)

+++

“Steve, holy shit.” Sam gets to Steve before Bucky can, but the sentiment is the same. Steve looks dazed.

“Is that what getting into character feels like?” Steve asks, vague. He looks at his hands.

“Audience adrenaline.” Bucky reaches out slowly and waits for Steve to nod before he touches his shoulder. “Always ramps things up to eleven. Always kinda scary the first time around.”

Steve nods very slowly. Sam appears to be trying very hard to not go full psychology mode.

“Can I eat the free cheese cubes now?” Steve asks.

“Yeah, mate.” Bucky rubs Steve’s shoulder and steers him towards the food platters on the foyer island. Sam gives Bucky a concerned thumbs-up. Bucky had not known a thumbs-up could be concerned until that moment. “Eat all the cheese you want.”

+++

“I’ve never felt scary before.” Steve says quietly later, when they’re in Bucky’s car outside Steve’s house but can’t seem to part ways yet. They’ve been sitting there for an hour. “Not ever.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t like it?” Bucky can’t see much of Steve’s face, the overhead light in his car dim, and the shadows across his face hide a lot.

“I’m not a scary person.” Steve shrugs. “Is this normal? To be scared by what you can be on stage?”

“Every time.” Bucky’s not sure how to do this, not sure how much their boundaries have changed since the last time they had to comfort each other, but he reaches out and curls his fingers around Steve’s hand anyway, presses his fingers into Steve’s palm. Steve threads their fingers together, a weird mirror of the night Steve got his black eye, and they sit there in silence for a moment. “That’s why you have to know who you are. You have to know what you want. Because as soon as you start losing yourself to the character or to the feelings you get on the stage, that’s when you start losing yourself.”

“How very profound.” Steve’s smiling, just a slight tip up in the corner of his mouth, but it’s enough.

“I somehow manage to still contain multitudes.” Bucky smiles back and Steve huffs a laugh.

+++

They end up talking until 1am.

They don’t stop holding hands the whole time.

+++

“Hey.” Morita greets Bucky on Saturday morning when they’re all gathered together for Falsworth’s English breakfast. It’s the last one they’ll have during the Uni term, so it feels more celebratory than normal. “How'd your and Stuart’s thing go?”

“Steve.” Bucky corrects, natural as breathing. Morita knows Steve’s name, he just likes annoying Bucky. “Went good. Steve had a first show freak out and ate a lot of cheese to calm down.”

“Ah, cheese.” Dum Dum says, far too wistful. “The food of bloody champions.”

“Struth.” Dernier says in the world’s fakest Australian accent. Gabe cackles.

+++

Right before their final acting class of the year Natasha pulls Steve aside and says “This is starting to get ridiculous.”

“What is?” Steve raises an eyebrow, but he has a sneaking suspicion that he knows exactly what she’s talking about.

“Whenever you two are alone together you fall into each other.” She continues. “You know everything there is to know about each other, and it makes you scared to ask to know anything else.” She takes a deep breath.

“Nat-”

“I told you once that you do what you have too to survive.” She presses on. “I was wrong. Surviving is great, but living is better. Take a goddamn risk, Steve, because _he’s_ not going to. He’s just as scared of ruining this as you are. Something has to give.”

“Natasha-”

“Uni is a time to be brave. Holidays are for dealing with the fallout.” She stops and pulls back the sleeve of her leather jacket to reveal a tattoo on her inner wrist, still raised and pink at the edges. It’s a sketchy silhouette of an en pointe ballerina. He blinks down at it. “All my life people have told me I’ll never get work if I get a tattoo, and anyone I’ve mentioned it to thought I wanted to get something scary, or fierce, or whatever it is they expect of me.” Her eyes are boring into his.

He knows what she’s saying. He knows, he just doesn’t know if he can do it.

“Natasha.” He feels desperate.

“Sometimes, Steve, you have to ignore what people expect and just do what you want.” She presses her fingers into his palm for a second before turning on her heel and walking into class. Steve stares at her helplessly.

“Steve!” Bucky calls from inside the classroom. Half of his hair has escaped his half-ponytail and is sticking to his face already. He’s smiling. “Are you coming in or what?”

Steve makes a decision.

+++

“Hey, Bucky?” Steve taps Bucky’s shoulder to get his attention after class. “Can I talk to you for a minute in private?”

Bucky barely blinks. “Sure thing.” He gestures to Sam and Foggy that they should leave without him. “Just in the other studio?”

Steve nods. Mostly, he feels as if he’s about to puke, violently.

They walk into the studio and Steve shuts the door. He takes a moment to breathe, eyes closed, and when he turns he sees Bucky sitting on top of a table up against the wall, his legs crossed. He’s tapping his fingers against each other.

“What’s up?” Bucky asks, calm as anything.

“I wanted to talk.” Steve feels like his insides are shaking apart and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. “About everything. About us.”

“Us?” Bucky raises an eyebrow.

“Yes.” Steve sits next to Bucky on the table. He stares very hard at his hands. “Us. And everything that’s been happening.”

“What do you-”

“Can I ask that you let me say my piece before you respond, please?”

“Mum’s the word.” Bucky says after a long moment of silence. He sounds like he’s trying to smile, but also like he’s suddenly questioning ever joining this conversation. Then again, Steve might be projecting.

“You see,” Steve starts, wishing he were brave enough to look at Bucky’s face while he says this, but he just can’t. “Buck, the thing is, my whole life has been so hectic this year. Moving and Uni and everything. I constantly feel like I can’t get my balance when I’m here.” He takes a deep breath. “Except for when I’m with you. You’ve always been there for me, ever since we were kids, and I’d never realised how much I missed all of that until I got it back.”

Bucky doesn’t sound like he’s breathing. Steve presses the pads of his thumbs together until they turn white.

“And I’ve been thinking lately about how differently we’ve been acting since the holidays. I thought maybe we’d started...” He shakes his head, unable to voice the feelings from the weeks leading up to this moment. “But I spoke to Natasha, and she really made me think about-”

“Natasha?” Bucky interrupts, voice strangled. Steve snaps his head up to look at him. Bucky’s eyes are very wide.

“You said you’d let me talk.” Steve tries to joke, but it feels flat. The whole moment feels charged with something Steve can’t identify. Then again, that might be Steve’s still present urge to run away and hide forever.

“You spoke to Natasha?” Bucky asks, firm. “About feelings? When?”

“Yes?” Steve can’t help but feel like this whole conversation is about to veer wildly away from the version he scripted in his head whilst agonising over it for the past 3 hours. “About a week before _First Cut._ And she really made me think about-”

“She’s an absolute piece of shit.” Bucky groans, and before Steve can leap in and defend Natasha’s honour Bucky’s grabbed Steve’s face in both hands and pulled him into a kiss.

“Woah.” Steve says when Bucky breaks away. It was, in all fairness, more of a face mash than an actual kiss. However, also in all fairness, Steve is maybe short-circuting.

“Natasha talked to me too.” Bucky explains quickly, spots of colour high on his cheeks. He’s still cradling Steve’s face, one thumb rubbing slowly along Steve’s jaw. “About feelings. And she made _me_ realise that maybe I’ve been ignoring some pretty obvious feelings that I may have. For you. But I didn’t know what to do about it.”

“Oh.” Steve’s stomach is doing flips, only now he hopes it’s in a good way. “She’s quite a conniving little thing, isn’t she?”

“Extremely.” Bucky bites his bottom lip. “So, um, do you want to do more talking or can I kiss you properly this time?”

“Kissing sounds good.” Steve nods. His heart wants to explode out of his chest. “I was kind of distracted that first time.”

Bucky smiles, his whole face softening into pure, unadulterated tenderness, and he leans in.

+++

Sam gets a text from Steve half an hour after class ends. All it contains is 8 exclamation points and 3 different kinds of kiss emoji.

 _“_ _Say hi to Bucky for me next time you break for air”_ Sam replies. He then takes a moment to stare at the ceiling and thank the Heavens that those two somehow managed to get their shit together.

Immediately after that, he sends a message to the _‘Tony stop’_ Facebook group.

+++

When Steve and Bucky finally walk into Eat @ 20 it is to find all of their friends sitting at a huge mess of tables that they’ve all shoved together, and every single one of them slow claps their entrance. Sam whoops with joy.

“I have never been prouder in my whole life.” Tony fake weeps. Thor hands him a tissue.

Steve grabs Bucky’s hand even as his ears burn hot pink. Bucky holds on just as tight.

**Author's Note:**

> *FIRST OFF I want to thank my AMAZING ARTIST for the Big Bang  
> http://yeahyeahno.tumblr.com/post/149641305635/also-for-the-stuckybigbang2016-project-thanks-to  
> They made my new favourite art and I appreciate the hell out of them. Everyone should go send them heart emoji's and stare at the art forever
> 
> *I want to thank everyone in my Acting degree for being weird enough that this idea had any traction, and for inspiring at least 4 of the scenarios I wrote about. I hope none of you ever find this
> 
> *I want to belatedly apologise for any Australianisms that Just Don't Make Sense. I know they don't. You learn to roll with it here
> 
> *I also apologise if my descriptions of my degree/campus/assessments aren't very clear. There are only so many ways to describe "There are bricks. And trees. Also a lot of dirt"
> 
> *Shout out to Schteven The Possum, who didn't make it into this fic but has been a staple part of my 3 years at Uni. I'll write a side story about you, no worries
> 
> *I know it's hard to believe but this is the bare minimum of what I wanted to write for this story (I originally thought it was going to be 15K. HA. HAHAHA) so the fact that it's finally finished enough to show the internet is astounding to me
> 
> *Thank you to anyone and everyone that reads this. This has been slowly growing in a Word document for at least 6 months and in my brain for even longer. I appreciate each and every one of you for sharing in my self-indulgent word vomit about dorks having feelings for each other and I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it


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